Getting better at Zoom

My side gig takes place on Zoom. I have used Zoom before, but I have never used it for teaching. When I teach I normally use Blackboard Collaborate, and if I just have one-to-one meetings I tend to use Teams. I am used to doing things like sharing screen in Blackboard Collaborate and Teams, but not in Zoom. So I would have a practice session with the Adult Learning Wales IT support team to run through it.

The first issue we had was some confusion that had its root 46 years ago. I had registered as Margo, as that is officially my name. But they had noticed I call myself Margot. So IT had first given me an email address with Margo in it, but then, on their own initiative, made another one with Margot in it. So first she had to wrestle with which account to use; did we need both, could she just kill one of them? But which? We settled on the account with the t. I am quite used to having accounts with that name.

Then there was Zoom itself. I started a meeting and invited Sarah, the IT lady, into it. The first thing that happened was that the software was using the wrong camera, microphone and speakers. That was quickly sorted. The next step was: showing my PowerPoint. If you present a PowerPoint, you normally put it in full screen mode. That means you have to share that entire screen with Zoom. But things got weird. I normally use two screens. My laptop screen is in their somewhere as well, but I don't really use that. It just shows the same as my main screen. But now suddenly my laptop screen and my main screen showing different things. One of them had the full screen presentation on it, and the other one had presenter view. And my cursor would only go onto one of these. And the problem was that Sarah saw my presenter view. That's not how I want it! In presenter view, your slides are quite small, because there also has to be space for the upcoming slide and for notes. Showing my PowerPoint like that would make the fonts quite small. We had to sort that. But I didn't understand what the computer was doing anyway!

Our session was also lit up by funny sounds coming from Sara's side: I heard growling, and it turned out that she had her dog lying under the desk, and it heard someone outside. Quite cute!

Sarah didn't quite know either. I did a quick Google. I first googled on how to present PowerPoints in Zoom, but that didn't help. Then I just googled how you can make PowerPoint put the full screen view on the secondary monitor. And that turned out to be very easy! So I just moved my camera around, put Zoom on my main screen, and presented on the secondary one, which I shared. And that worked! Sarah now had the view I wanted her to have.

We also checked whether I can see raised hands (yes) or the chat (no) while presenting. And lastly, I sent her off into a breakout room. That worked fine! And then I had no further questions. I felt ready for the actual presentation!