best_practices_2013

BEST PRACTICES 2013
While Denise concentrated on creating the content of her marketing
presentation, her co-worker, Sissy Riley, focused on the technical aspects of
bringing it to life. Sissy first tried to record the presentation as a PowerPoint
file, but soon discovered that she was unable to embed the audio
component. To bypass this limitation, Sissy instead created a narration in
PowerPoint and converted the file to a movie. She also encountered loading
problems with the iCohere conference software -- mostly due to the file size
and iCohere compression issues. Their own overkill solution was to load the
file on Facebook, Youtube, and MilSuite as alternate sites.
Among the lessons they learned:
Familiarity leads to success (or practice makes perfect): Finding and taking
more time to train on the conference software before the virtual session
would have been extremely beneficial.
Two heads (and eyes and hands) are better than one: Working as a team
made co-ordination and multi-tasking easier, especially in dealing with the
technical problems encountered by, and the topical questions submitted by,
the live audience.
We’re all in the same boat (or at least some of us): While virtual
conferencing was new to Denise as a presenter, it was also a new experience
for many of the attendees; in some instances, it seemed that the session was
a case of the blind leading the blind.
Technology is our friend: it’s necessary to keep an open mind about change -
- a person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
Presenting at the Army Virtual Training session was a unique challenge for
Denise and Sissy, but would we do it again? With the click of a mouse!
Another Perspective of the Presenters, Lily McGovern and Karen
Cooper
Karen Cooper and Lily McGovern were asked to present sessions based on
presentations they had previously given to other audiences. In a time of no
money for travel and precious little for training, they were happy to join in
this effort to provide a professional training opportunity for Army Libraries.
They have both presented at conferences and were excited to try out a new
technology to deliver distance training. Trudie scheduled times for them to
test drive the system, provided handouts and guides and coached them in
using the webinar software. They were thrilled to learn that they could use
most of the features without having to download any software or plug-ins
(security issues). They couldn’t use a camera or live screen sharing, but the
features of iCohere allowed use of slides and sharing URLs so participants
could go to websites that were discussed.
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