Hello and welcome to this video on live session features and controls.

What I’d like to do in this session is share some of the basic functionality of common webinar or live sessions software that's available to help you get started with delivering webinars and live sessions particularly for the first time and to talk about some of the interactivity features, things that can help develop engaging sessions for instructor to participant connection and also participant to participant connection.

So let's get started and have a look at some of the basic features.

So basic controls and layout you have are your main screen here where I'm sharing some slides that I've set up earlier. You have the basic controls here at the bottom of the screen which are more your personal settings and controls your audio, so your
microphone so that you're muted or whether you're unmuted.

A key tool to be able to use very quickly and get used to be able to use very quickly and easily to mute yourself. Your webcam function as well similar kind of thing that switching a video on, I’ve switched my video off in this case.

There's also a raised hand function when you click that as a participant it lets the moderator know that you've got a question or you've got an issue or that you need some kind of help or support.

There's some further settings and status actions here in the settings which we’lll come back to you a bit later today. Next up, you know in addition to the main page, you have what's typically on the right hand side panels a list of participants. So normally your list of people who are attending your session would be populated here.

And then you have your chat function, other options around sharing content and some settings here as well. We'll come on to those in a bit more detail in a few moments time.

So once you're familiar with the basic setup the basic layout tends to be similar across the different software that's available and once you are familiar with your microphone and video settings,you might want just to double check that the settings are working.

And in this case, you can come to the my settings section and look at the set up camera and microphone settings that are available.

You can also share for participants the dial-in functionality. Not every system has that but this system does and most systems do so, you can always share the details for participants to dial-in if they're struggling with connection or don't have a
microphone.

It might be easier for them to use the phone to attend the session and once you're happy that all that's working. Your audio is working etc. You'll probably want to be
thinking about recording the session.

So getting that set up and ready so that you can record the session and share it for those that weren't able to attend and each system has a little as a different space where the record button sits.

But in this case, it's really simple, up in the top left hand corner click on this extra menu here and you can start the recording very simply by clicking on the button there.

When you are ready to go back to the session and end the recording you come back to the same space and it will then say stop recording you stop the recording, you will have access to the recording afterwards. Sometimes that's emailed out directly to you depending on the system.

Sometimes that's available within another account space and you just have to log into your account and extract the link to the recording for your participants. Then you can share it and make it available to everyone. So basic features here to help you
with getting started that should be enough just to get you up and running get the session started.

And then what am I going to do now is have a look at some of the more kind of interactive features, some of the things that help engage your participants, connect your participants to yourself and to each other.

And one of the key things is the chat function here typically on the right hand side of the screen. Here participants can choose whether they'd like to message everyone in the group, so everybody that's attending the session they can send a message out directly to everybody and so everyone will see what's happening. Or they can select a message just the moderators or the instructors, so the individuals like myself who are running the session and that's a more of a sort of private chat function.

Just to come to the attendee. You can also choose if there's a participant that you want to have a private message or a private chat with. You can search this field here to find the person you want to speak to and send them a direct message as well.

It's worth being careful for the participants point of view to make sure that they're posting the messages in the white space, of course, but typically the participants will use the space that everyone can see and they can type something in here and it will
come up on the screen.

They'll be able to respond to others and see what's happening and it's a really useful functionality for the instructor because particularly when you have large groups or even you know, any more than five or six participants with microphones on it can get quite difficult with people talking over each other not knowing when to speak.

So when you have a question you want to ask the group you can pose the question using your microphone and ask the participants to respond using the chat function that way you can observe all of the responses when you clearly.

You can give them a minute or two just to think about the response and have enough time to answer the question and also just offer a little bit of a pause or break in the session for the participants to be doing something active and to get them engaged in the session.

So important to regularly stop and ask questions, one of the ways in which you can do that is to use the chat function and get free text responses from the participants.

Another way you can pause and ask questions is using the voting functionality and the voting functionality is in this system available here underneath the my status and settings space here and you can see some of the pre-populated options here for feedback which you can use as a kind of voting tool.

And so for example, you might want to ask participants to know if this session is going too slowly and you can ask them to vote. And if I vote that I think it's going too slowly and I think it should go faster. As the administrator of the moderator of the session you will see he’s up here and you'll see a tally for the number of people who have responded faster or slower.

And it's a really good way particularly with larger groups to get a quick response and to get a real quick pulse check of the room to understand how they are getting on with everything and if there is anything you need to change about the session to
make things move more smoothly.

But you can also use it you can get creative with how you might use it and use it for feedback on specific questions and topics that you have or to check understanding, you know, so you could ask the group, is everybody happy with this, do you need me to go over it again, please just vote, you know, you're happy for me to continue or sad and you want me to re-review that go over that again.

And you can be kind of creative in how you use this but a good way to get a really easy quick feedback on questions that you might like to ask.

The third option is polling and I have a look at the polling system with you.So here you can set up a couple of different options typical across all the different types of systems available.

Here you can have either multiple choice of yes or no questions.

So in the multiple choice option, you can type in here at your question and then you can type in the potential responses and you can send this pole to the group the group will get the
chance to respond and you'll be able to share the responses to the whole cohort or the participants, which is a good way to do things a particularly good way to share the responses so that everybody can see it but the polls typically do require a little bit
more planning in advance.

So if you want to use polling usually you have to think of the questions and responses and advanced have them ready and set up and in some cases you actually have to set up and save the poll questions in advance of the session and essentially tag them to a specific section of the session.

So if you have a session on a Tuesday, 2:00 o'clock and you want to use the poll, you'll have to go in and plan that session, write the polls, save them for that session.

And so they do require a little bit more planning events in this system.

You can write the question live, so I could be writing the question now and writing the responses but you will just then need to factor in the time that you're writing those questions for the poll into your session, bearing in mind that the participants will be
waiting for you to do that.

So a little bit of consideration about how you might like to use them but a nice and engaging tool to use particularly for the participants to see the feedback.

Another interactive function you can use is the Whiteboard function. I'm not going to toggle that on because it removes the screens that I'm sharing just now but you know, essentially the Whiteboard function offers a white screen here a blank screen
where you can see my slide here and these tools here above where you can draw you can add shapes you can add text you can clear it.

You can add different backgrounds etc and you can use that to draw things draw graphs or charts or to write things out that might be complex that you want to teach in real time and use that as a kind of collaborative space for the participants to add
things as well as you can allow the participants to write on the Whiteboard also.

A really nice way of engaging and live way of teaching, essentially replacing your whiteboard or chalkboard, you know, you might have in your classroom.

And finally a really interesting feature is the breakout rooms, which are a great way to divide up the larger cohort the larger participant groups into smaller groups for individual tasks or activities or things that you might like them to discuss as a in
smaller groups.

What you can do is take the whole cohort and break it up into as many different smaller groups that you'd like and you can arrange these settings once you have more participants.

You can adjust how you'd like to assign people to groups. You can put people into groups automatically adjust based on the number of people you want in each group.

You can manually place people into groups if you've got groups that are pre-existing in maybe a blended learning setting that you already have groups available and you want to make sure those groups are maintained and that they discuss here.

Once you start the breakout group functionality, all the participants will be divided up into their own smaller group space virtual space they'll have the chance to chat use some of the functions that are available here and then you'll be able to close those rooms and they can come back to the main room to share any outputs from that that group session or to get some feedback on some of the things that they could have been doing.

Some great functionality, something that's a little bit more advanced for those that are new to to live sessions and webinars and again like a bit like the polling takes a

little bit of planning and just thought in advance in terms of how you might actually like to do this and so a little bit of thought and planning going into this will help.

But really that's essentially a quick run through some of the basic features of common webinar systems and live session systems.

I've used here Blackboard collaborate, not the only system of course.

Each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages. But you know, the best thing is really just to get in with them playing around with some of the controls have a look at some of these features that I've highlighted and find where they are so that
you know where they are when you need to use them test out any activities that you might want to use just so you see how they work and really just have some fun with it and try to just play around get some experience with it.

There's no substitute for testing out and getting hands on with it, but best of luck for anyone that's new to it having a go at it. Just give it a go and see how you get on, best of luck.

I hope it's helpful.