 VP education, Velu approached me and he said, I have this project that I want to deliver workshops in capital speakers for every meeting. And it's part of my larger project to educate our members. I thought that's a great idea, Velu. I believe we need workshops to develop ourselves. And I said, okay, let me come up with something which I'm familiar with, especially after the pandemic. I have been doing a lot of online work. So let me deliver a workshop on how to speak with confidence online. A few days ago, I found a very interesting poster made by Toastmasters International which sort of relates to what I am seeing today. And I thought I'll bring it up and show it to you. It said boost online meeting confidence. And tip number one is to leave your camera on while listening to speakers. Give them the same attention you would in person so they can adjust to the reactions and you can both better engage. When we talk about being in a physical meeting, what happens is that we are there. We are there physically for those two hours or one and a half hour that we spend. We are part of the meeting. All of us contribute together. We have this saying that you get out of Toastmasters how much that you put inside it. So the more you put in, the more speeches you give, the more roles that you take. Most importantly, the more members that you support. You will benefit out of Toastmasters. Makes sense that the same thing would apply in an online meeting, that if you want to have that confidence, you have to put the same effort in the online meeting. And today I'm actually going to talk more about that. What kind of tools and technology we can use to translate our physical skills into an online world, especially in this day, where it looks like online is going to be a reality. People have adapted to online. The sense of doing something online is going to be part of our life. And that means we need to adapt to the tools and technology. And some of it might require us to do some investment to improve our presence. The learning objectives of our session today, that is what are the tools and technology we need? What is the communication style we need to adapt in an online world? What's an online etiquette? And some of the presentation techniques. Because what I have seen is many people have become so used to screen sharing, making a PowerPoint, and then click share and show as a PowerPoint while they are not visible at all on the screen. And so it becomes more of watching a PowerPoint presentation rather than watching a person deliver a message. And there's a big difference between conveying your message through a PowerPoint and then doing something like this, where I have your attention. I can see who's listening to me. I can observe your reactions. Let me start with some of the tools and techniques. So once we talk about online, connectivity becomes your number one priority. In fact, in my opinion, the sequence that I have listed here is the sequence of importance. The first thing is to have a good connection. And that might mean, even if you have a reasonable connection for that meeting or that presentation, we make sure that it is not used for anything other than delivering a message. It might mean telling our children, okay, just for these two hours can we not watch Netflix? And so this is something you need to start thinking of what is the best connection that we can have for our meeting so that you don't get disconnected. The speed remains consistent throughout the meeting. So that's the number one priority. Somehow you have to figure out to get the best connection possible. And the next part is really more about audio. How to get the best audio possible. I can see, for example, many of us are using headsets because you know that if your microphone is closer to your mouth, it means your audio will come clearer. You can see me using a big microphone because whenever I do workshops, I want to make sure that only you can hear my voice and no background noise. So as we go forward, this will become like a necessity whenever you're connecting to an online meeting. When it comes to video, so if you're using a mobile, you might be already having an advantage because those cameras are really good. If you're stuck with a laptop, you might think of investing in a webcam and there are some really good webcams. Camera is very important because if you don't have a good camera, then face will not be clear. We won't be able to see expression, especially if you're a trainer, then you need to think about investing something like that. Light also plays a very important role. And again, I see a lot of you all have already started understanding how light works, making sure that you sit in a place where your face faces the light, not the light behind you. Because if there is light behind you, your camera will adapt to think that it should sort of focus on the light and your face will become dark. So a simple trick of facing the light is all you need to make sure that your message delivery is clear to us and your facial expressions are clear to us. And finally, you of course need a reasonably good device that can handle maybe a virtual background. Some older laptops are unable to handle virtual backgrounds. So you need something that will handle the demands of an online meeting, especially Zoom. Willy Hill says, your video looks very good. Are you using a special webcam? I'm not using a webcam. I'm actually using a digital mirrorless camera, the Sony camera. And so, yeah, I brought it specially for my trainings because what it does is it can automatically focus on whatever I place in front of it. And that's why I have to make sure every time I come and sit here, I shave because even the slightest stubble, it will pick it up and so that's the bad side of it. I can't hide whenever I'm coming in front of this. But because I do a lot of training, I thought I should step up to something beyond the web camera. Now, the camera position is very important. You need to figure out a way that the lens of the camera is more or less in line with your eyes. In my case, I have kept it a little higher because monitor is blocking my view. If I want to have a clear view of my face, then I had to position it slightly higher. It's better than slightly lower because when you have it lower, it tends to look straight into your nose. And trust me, we don't, nobody wants to look at inside our nose, right? So the best position to keep your camera is, whatever the camera might be, look at the camera, where is it? And position it at the eye level. If you're having a laptop, it might mean that you need to have some boxes and place those boxes and then put the laptop on top of the box and then measure your eyesight along with the camera. The next is very important in terms of engagement. Now, what happens is I have dual monitors here and all of your videos are on this screen. So if I was to look at you, you can see that I'm not looking at you, right? I can see you're laughing, I can see you smiling, but my delivery to you is not very effective because I'm not looking at you. That requires lots and lots of practice. I have got that practice by doing a lot of YouTube videos, recording it, watching how I look. Sometime it can be quite unnerving because you know the audience is here. I want to see them, are they laughing? Are they smiling? But then I know that my eye contact, my engagement with that audience will be lost. And sometimes when I'm creating a YouTube video, obviously there is no audience behind, which means I don't even know who I'm communicating to. But what I do know is that when I speak to the camera, whoever is watching that video, whether it's live or whether it's a YouTube video, they are listening and they are watching me and I'm sort of communicating directly to them. And this would require us to keep practicing it and not look down at your screen when we are talking to observe the reaction of the audience, but stick to talking to the lens. You have to speak to that lens all the time. And we can do that only by practice, practice and observing. And as we do in our on-site meetings, just keep practicing. After sometime it becomes natural that, you know, that's the audience. I need to talk to you. Captions, this is something I do to make sure that my language is clear. It is understandable. So what I do is I open a captioner. It's a website where you can start talking and it will caption real time, whatever you are saying. Just go to the website, start talking and it will start interpreting and you will come to know which words you have problems with when you're speaking. The next part is more about the online etiquette, how to practice your muting and muting. And this is more about technology that you should become familiar with where your mute button is, where your unmute button is, when you should enable your camera, when you should switch off your camera. And to have the confidence that when you start the speech, you don't start by saying, am I audible? Most of us have this issue. We can see the microphone levels, right? We can see the microphone levels, but still the first question we'll ask is, am I audible? In fact, I believe last year's word of the, or the phrase of the year was, am I on mute or something like that? Because that's the phrase that we use most often, but you should have that confidence that as long as your microphone is working, when you click unmute, you know that the audience can hear you. And there are a few simple tips or tricks that you can do is before you start the meeting in Zoom, we can see that we have this mute button and we have this audio settings. Before starting the meeting, make sure that you test your speaker and then test your microphone to see that these levels are going up and down. And you have that confidence that, yes, everything is working fine here. Now you know that when you unmute yourself, you are confident you don't have to say, am I on mute? And of course the time management. And you notice that in my case, even though I'm giving a workshop, I have made sure that I don't need to look at any timer because I'm doing self-timing. I know that since I started my speech, it is 22 minutes, 57 seconds. We need to be clear about our time management. Sometimes we can get lost because as we start speaking, maybe we can't see the timer screen. Maybe we didn't pin the timer, we were not in the right view. The simple trick for that obviously would be, first is switch to a gallery view. You will be able to see the timer. Other options could include things like pinning the timer so that it is always on your screen. So this requires you to become a little more expert in the Zoom features other than just launching Zoom and not knowing what are the features available. Play around with all of the features that are there and become comfortable with the technology itself. And finally, things that trainers and speakers use nowadays is something like this, where I can talk to you and I'm there, plus I'm able to share my points at the site or anywhere else for that matter. We can be very creative in this because this is using something called a virtual camera. All the trainers nowadays are switching over to this method of teaching, more innovative methods of teaching where we can bring content, bring a camera together and then talk to you. And this requires you to do little more investment, not in money, because all this is free by the way, whatever I'm doing, but it requires you to do some investment in learning those tools and technologies beyond Zoom. So instead of besides having Zoom, you would have some other software installed on yours, which creates what we call this virtual camera scene. And that's why I'm able to switch to different scenes and give you different viewpoints with the click of a button. And at the same time, I can see all of you all, I can observe all of you all. Recently Zoom came up with a very interesting option called PowerPoint sharing. And let me demonstrate that to you. Those of you have not encountered it. What it does is it creates something like this. It creates a virtual camera of your PowerPoint, but the only disadvantage is it only works with PowerPoint. So let me open up one PowerPoint for you and show you in Zoom how I can do it. So I will click share screen. If you all look at your share screen, there is an option called advanced PowerPoint as virtual background. So as you can see, I'm sharing a PowerPoint presentation to you, but using a feature of Zoom called PowerPoint as virtual background. So what it has done is it has made a virtual background of my camera, which I can move around anyway I want. But it only works with PowerPoint because what it does is it takes all the slides, makes them as virtual backgrounds and shows it to you. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but that is something you could try in your next meeting. If you don't have the virtual camera, if you don't have the technical knowledge about virtual cameras, you could try PowerPoint sharing. It would work fine. PowerPoint in Teams, this was something I had done for ACK. They use Microsoft Teams, so I won't be able to demonstrate to you this next two items. But in general, this was my presentation to you that you have the skills, you know how to speak, but how do you translate them in an online world by using these tools and techniques and more importantly, having this kind of conversation where you adapt by speaking to a camera rather than speaking to a screen.