 Thank you very much for that warm introduction and welcome to all those who are here today for the session on the Moderator Academy. I'm sure many of you all have conducted Zoom meetings and let me ask you a question. Let's say that you know how to start a meeting, you know how to admit people into a meeting, a normal Toastmaster meeting and at the end of the day, you know how to end the meeting and say bye. If now you are given an opportunity to say, would you be the moderator of DTAC 2022? How many of you all would raise your hands? If you have raised your hands, maybe you're a little scared. At that level, maybe I can't do it. What if I give you an opportunity to be the moderator for a division contest? How many are there? So you all are not interested in division level contests. What about area contests? How many are willing to take up the moderator role as area contests? As I mentioned, my name is Kajutin Barreto. I am part of District 20 and I have been creating a lot of YouTube videos for Toastmasters on my channel, Tech for Toastmasters and that has led me to districts around the world who are invited me to conduct sessions on Zoom, on Canva, on PR, on branding. To get the most out of today's session, keep your microphones muted, use the speaker view and please do put your queries in chat. Safety is always paramount in Toastmasters and in life. So ensure that you are always safe environment wherever you're sitting. I'm going to cover the moderator role today. What are the District 20 best practices? What's the contest setup? How do you set up a Zoom? What's the team structure to conduct an effective contest? And again, we'll have a Q&A session at that. As a moderator, I think of this role as a conductor in an orchestra. The only difference is in an orchestra, you would see the conductor raising his baton to conduct all the musicians. So you do see him as part of the act. But in a Zoom contest, if you attend a contest and you never saw or heard the Zoom moderator at all, it means he or she is a great moderator because everything that a moderator does is behind the scenes. When the COVID happened, everyone was struggling to figure out how do we do contests. And so District 20 came up with what we call the best practices for online speech contests. This document was released in early 2020 and I have reviewed it and I have updated a few things. But generally, whatever was done at that time, still holds good. District 20 defined structure to conduct an effective contest. And this is a quote I like from our immediate past district director. He was a quality director, PQD at that time. Approach an online contest as any normal contest with the same level or more of effort, preparation, dedication and teamwork. In other words, whatever is there in the rulebook that you have learned from Gita and other people earlier in the morning, apply the same things, assume it's a physical contest and only adapt to the online aspects by following this guidelines. This gives us an unique opportunity, according to DTM Alisha Baaz, to enhance our leadership and communication and public speaking skills on a virtual platform. Let's excel beyond boundaries. Moderator role is one of those roles that gives us an opportunity to conduct a leadership role. Very effectively because if you want to be a good moderator, if you want to conduct a flawless contest, your leadership skills will be tested because you cannot just go to a contest on the day of the contest. I am the moderator. If you don't have the like the conductor, the full vision of what's going to happen exactly when and so ensuring that the right people have the right access, the right abilities to deliver or to perform their tasks and in at the end of the day, ensuring that the contestants shine on the stage. As a moderator, if you want to become moderator, you need to have those Zoom skills to log in to change the settings in the Zoom account and then to have that presence of mind, I would say, while the contest is going on, to control like the conductor, who can speak, who cannot speak, who can see and so forth. So behind the scenes, you should be aware of all of the options that are available in Zoom. So get yourself familiar with Zoom. The licensing part, you don't have to worry too much about it. You will choose the account that you have. A normal account is what clubs are using these days, can host up to 100. And I think up to area level, a normal Zoom account is good enough. But once you go to the division level and so forth, you may have to request the district to borrow their account for conducting the division contests, which can accommodate up to 500 participants in the contest. There are plenty of Zoom tutorials. So if you want to become a moderator, start learning how to use the various features of Zoom because you can't, at the point when the contest is going on, you can't learn at that point. You have to know what can be done, what cannot be done with a single click. So learning Zoom is what you need to do. As a moderator, your internet needs to be good. That goes without saying. And some of you all actually sort of hesitate becoming a Zoom moderator because you are worried about your internet. You're worried that while the contest is going on, you might get disconnected. But you do need good internet. That's the prerequisite for moderation. Or for any of the key role players, contest chair, master of ceremony, they do need good internet. And for contestants for that brief period, it goes without saying they need good internet if they want to deliver an excellent presentation. I believe audio is the essence of any role player or moderator or for that matter of the contestant. But here we are talking from a role player perspective that you need to communicate something while the contest is going on. You have to somehow invest in that small item that will make the difference between talking to a normal microphone on your laptop to something like a headset, something like this that you see on the picture, a headset. The entire essence of audio is that the microphone should be as close to your mouth as possible. So you need to find something that brings the micro, even if it is airports or even if it's a wired headset, whatever it is, I kept improving till I reached the point that as you can see, I am literally speaking into the microphone. And when I do that, my audio should be nice and crisp and clear to you. So I'm not asking you to invest something in it, but something, a headset or something that will bring the microphone close to you. So when you're giving your instructions, when you're giving the briefings, if you're a role player, they are crisp and clear to both the contestants and the audience. So do invest in a good headset for your audio. And you need to know how to understand the Zoom, because Zoom is made up of two parts. And it's very important that you prepare yourself not on the day of the contest, because the way Zoom works is there is one part of Zoom where you have to go to the Zoom account. So let's say I'm going to use this account of mine to run the contest. There are certain settings that we need to place or update in this Zoom account before we start the contest. Because what happens is if you start the contest with incorrect settings and the contest already started, there's nothing you can do about it. And unless you terminate the session and boot everybody off the contest and restart it, because some of the settings require you to start the meeting again for them to be effective. There are certain settings, if you change them and you say, I want only this to happen, but the meeting has already started, it will not take effect until you close the meeting and you start the meeting again. So you need to understand what settings you need to put to have a correct contest without any problems. And the way I recommend it is you understand the settings based on the document that I have provided. Make sure they are all updated in the Zoom account and then run a test meeting with the same account. So you create the settings, you have a mock with that account and use that same account for the actual contest. Because if you suddenly start a contest with an account where the settings are not done properly, you will run into trouble. So what are the recommended settings? For example, the chat we enable it, but there is a way to disable it while the contest is going on. But the settings in Zoom would be to have the chat enabled. Annotations and the whiteboard, we recommend it to be completely disabled because people can use it to sort of disturb or zoom bomb your contest by writing something on the whiteboard or annotation while you're presenting something, while you're showing a PowerPoint. So disable these options. How do you do disable it? If you go to your Zoom settings and you, for example, say annotations, if you scroll through all the settings, one of the settings will be whiteboard, right? So for your annotations, for example, I have disabled it. Whiteboard, if I was running a contest, I would recommend that we disable that too. So all of the settings that are provided to you, go and change them and then save them and then run a test with those settings so that you don't get into trouble while the contest is going on. Nonverbal feedback is what you see, thumbs up and all the smiley faces. You can enable it. Breakout rooms, it is very important before the contest starts that you enable them because what would happen if you disable the breakout room by mistake and the contest has started already and you want to send people into the breakout room for table topics. No breakout rooms available. What would you do? Panic. So ensure that the breakout room setting is enabled in your Zoom settings and enable the waiting room for all the participants so that they don't jump into the meeting straight away. They stay in the waiting room and then they come. So these are the type of recommendations. If you follow all of this, we can guarantee you that you will be able to run the meeting or a contest without any problems. Then comes the actual Zoom meeting setting itself. What I mean by Zoom settings and Zoom meetings, as a moderator, you would know if I go back to my account. So these are my settings. This is where I go and change all the settings. But there are certain settings you can override it when you create the contest itself. What I mean by that? Suppose you are clicking on this meeting option and you want to schedule a new contest. Let's say which is happening next Friday. So you would say schedule a meeting contest for my club. So that's the topic. That's the name of the meeting. So as you can see, when I create the meeting, there are certain settings I can enable it, which essentially can override the settings that were defined in the Zoom settings. So you have your Zoom settings first, but while doing the actual meeting, that specific meeting, you can enable certain settings or disable certain settings. When we talk about these settings, there is a guideline for you how you will give the details, what to enable, what to disable. So we can see here mute participants on entry has been enabled for that just to be sure that we when the participant enters, whether at any time of this contest, automatically he is muted. So we don't have to worry about any disruptions to the contest. This settings are available while you are creating the meeting. Talking about the structure of the contest itself, and we, when we were doing this contest, we had created multiple sessions, multiple trials to see what works and doesn't work. As we know, in any Zoom meeting, there can be only one moderator. And when I say moderator, what I mean by is host cannot be two hosts. There can be only one host. Earlier, when we first started this online contest, only the host, for example, could create breakout rooms. But now after many updates in the Zoom system, actually now many of the tasks that only the host could do can now be done by the co-host also. So really today, when you think about a contest, there is not much difference between a host and a co-host. So what you could theoretically do is you could have one host, but then you can have a support who's like a host who does all of the logistics, like who creates the breakout rooms, who mute participants, who unmute and so forth. All this could be done now by the co-host, spotlighting and so forth. But still, the host or the moderator is, as I said, the conductor of the whole session. He must be there throughout monitoring, basically monitoring what is going on, what's going to come next, are we ready for it and so forth. So that's the role of the moderator. As I said, as a host, there is no backup as such. So moderator, there is only one in a meeting. Then, of course, we have Sergeant Atam, a co-host, a co-moderators. You can call them whatever you want. The more available, the better. And their role, obviously, is to monitor the waiting room. And now, as I said, with the new update, the co-host can also manage the breakout rooms. So you could have one person dedicated only for breakout rooms. So whenever, let's say, there is a protest and the chief judge wants to go to the protest room with the contestant or with the judges, they know this is the person to contact. So if your contest is at a division level and all that, you could do that at an area level or at a club level. Maybe you can manage the activities yourself. The more the co-host, the better it will be for you to sort of assign responsibilities of managing the different aspects of the contest. We know timer. There is requirement for one timer and then at least one more as a backup so that you have timing. And if the timer has technical difficulties, then the backup timer will be available. Master of ceremony, of course, is the only thing I would say is that there should be a backup master of ceremony with the script ready. So while the master of ceremony is talking gets disconnected, the backup jumps in and completes the process. So you as a moderator should be able to manage that in understanding who's the master of ceremony, who's the backup so that if the master of ceremony disconnects, you give the co-host rights to the backup master of ceremony. Again, the same story applies. Make sure that you know who's the contest chair, who's the backup contest chair, anything goes wrong, you know how to transition. So it's the role of the host to constantly monitor. And I have done moderation for all kinds of contest up to the DTECH. And I remember once I was sitting in the chair from morning till evening. And my wife used to come and serve me food because I was not doing anything, but I was just monitoring to make sure everything is going according to what is planned. Then of course, chief judge from a moderation point of view, I normally make sure that the chief judge has the co-host rights. And the reason for this is everybody else is muted. They can't unmute themselves. So only the chief judge, if he wants to interrupt for any reason, something is going wrong, then to ensure that the chief judge has immediate access to interrupt or stop the contest. The way I do it is we give them the co-host rights. For contestants, of course, we have a separate document for the best practices for contestants. The tool, as mentioned, even by Gita is that the communication tool is WhatsApp and Zoom. So the WhatsApp is used for quick communication because what happens is in Zoom, you have to be very careful because most of the time the chat will be disabled. When the contest starts, the chat is disabled and it will be enabled maybe during the break. But you can't rely on chat because sometime you might make a mistake and send a message which will be visible to everyone. So don't use Zoom for any communication which is related to the contest, like timing, sharing, timing information, or anything like that. That should be all done in WhatsApp outside so that there is no disturbance in the event itself. So this is how we look at a contest setup. So as you can see, when we create a contest, the waiting area and the contest is by default part of Zoom. Because as I mentioned, when we set Zoom settings, we say enable waiting room. So essentially Zoom will give us two areas, the main area where everyone is and it will create the waiting area. That's by default from Zoom. And then if you want anything else other than that, that's called the breakout rooms where you create breakout rooms for let's say judges for isolation, separate one for ballot count. It's up to you. In fact, I create these breakout rooms on a need basis. I don't even have this breakout room when the contest is going on. When I know, for example, a contest table topic is about to start, I just hit the button and I say create breakout room. I create a isolation room and I send people in there. When that contest is over, I just delete it so that people don't accidentally go into those rooms. So I create them on a need basis and you could do the same thing. There is no need to keep this room set up earlier because it takes only a few seconds. If you, as I said, once you become good in Zoom, it's basically a few seconds to create any room. And for example, if you say isolation room and you want to assign people to that room, then of course we have those protocols which you know that every contestant is asked to name themselves as international one, international two. So you can easily assign them by looking at those names and putting them in that room within a few seconds. Some of the examples of rooms that we can create is judges briefing room. If the briefing is done on the day, but normally now we have found over the last one year and a half, it's best to do all the contestant briefing, all the judges briefing a day before. So in fact, you don't even need these two rooms anymore. Okay, because if you leave the briefing to the last day of the contest, as we do in physical, the challenge becomes like the briefing is people come late, the briefing is not done and it delays the contest. So do everything the day before so that when you come for the contest, you just start and you're up and running. Then comes the waiting room, because waiting room is something that people sometimes get stuck for a long time because many chief judges recommend to the moderator and to the sergeant atoms do not allow any attendees while the contest is or the speech is going on. And so they might be stuck in that room for four, five minutes and might think there's something wrong. So what we can do is we can configure our waiting room with the right information and with the right message so that they when they log in, they can see that information and the way we do that is it is in your Zoom settings. If you go in your Zoom account, you go to your waiting room. So we can here do something called customize waiting room. And in the customization, we can put up a logo, we can put up a message, save it, right? And then here we can put a right message so that the attendees when they enter, they will see this message, whatever that message is. You can customize up to 400 characters as you can see, and that's up to you entirely. So this is how you can customize before the meeting starts. Again, remember, all of these things must be done before you start your meeting. Make sure that the right people are given the co-host rights. So for example, the master of ceremony, you would need co-host rights, the sergeant atoms would need co-host rights. So all of this has to be done by the host because only the host can assign co-host. Nobody else can do it. So you need to be sure. Let's say the table topic contest just before the contest starts, make him the co-host. When the contest ends, remove the co-host rights. That's the way you will sort of oversee the entire contest. And this is what I was talking about the room assignment of the breakout rooms, how we do it. You can create these different rooms like this. And now there are certain new options available in Zoom that allow you to move the contestants automatically into the breakout rooms without them having to click anything. And when you want the contestants to come into the main session, you can send a message and bring them one by one as a host or as a co-host for that matter. That will help you to streamline and make sure that contestants don't accidentally leave the breakout room and end up in the main session. It used to happen before, but now we can configure this Zoom settings in such a way that the contestants cannot come into the main session unless the moderator instructs them to come. Then coming to the contestant briefing, we, as I mentioned, we recommend now that it should be done a day before or two days before so that we don't have anything on the day of the contest. And then how do we define speaking order? There are different ways you can do. If you have to do it, it's normally done by the contestor, but we normally use random.org, list randomizer. So you can put all the names here, let's say Geeta, Anita, and then say randomize. And within a few seconds, you have your speaking order using something like this. This could be done during the briefings by the contest chair. It is not the only way to do the speaking order, but this is one of the ways you could do it. Timing, of course, how you do the timing is really important because the contestants rely on it. Now we know that we can do virtual backgrounds very easily. So that's one way to do that. Before, we also used to recommend that the contestants use this option called hide non-video participant. But as I mentioned to you, with the co-host now able to show the timer on the top left corner, maybe that is no longer such an issue. You could choose to either do this or move the timer to the right location on the screen. And of course, you could always instruct the contestant if you want to be really sure, pin the video. And then they don't have to worry about the timer disappearing because it's pinned. And here there are certain guidelines for you to what kind of script that you can use. Some of the standard scripts that are available for the sergeant at arms, for the master of ceremony, for the contest chair. Contestants, of course, they need to familiarize themselves with the online protocols, what's the best way that they can convey their message as clearly as possible. For ballot marking, for the one minute of silence, you could use something like this. While the contest is going on, we will disable the chat so that nobody can chat how the ballots should be sent across to the judges, from the judges to the ballot counters. And finally, we have something like a sample tally sheet where you could use an Excel file and then fill it up and arrive at the final ranking. And then there is a FAQ of some of the questions that were normally posed and what should be the response to that. So this is a very valuable tool for a moderator to understand how we can conduct the session without worrying about the protocols, like what's the right way to do what's and if you follow these guidelines, we can ensure you that you can be the moderator for DTECH. No questions about it.