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The People Gardener Podcast with Rhonda Delaney
The People Gardener Podcast with Rhonda Delaney
How to Transform Your Zoom Experience for Greater Engagement with Betsy Sabatini
This episode emphasizes the transformation of virtual meetings through effective Zoom strategies. We explore how to engage attendees, utilize various features for enhanced interaction, and create a professional atmosphere that fosters connection.
• Importance of preparing Zoom settings before meetings
• Effective security features to ensure meeting safety
• Enhancing video and audio quality for better engagement
• Interactive tools like chat, reactions, and breakout rooms
• Designing meetings to maximize participant experience
• Tips for conducting successful virtual events
If you're looking for more expert insights on Zoom, grab Betsy's free ebook and join our community for ongoing tips and updates.
Well, hey there, welcome to the People Gardener podcast. I'm Rhonda Delaney, your host, also known as the People Gardener, thrilled to put this podcast together to help small business owners, new business owners, frustrated business owners and aspiring leaders, whether they're inside business or outside. Each week, we bring you some actionable steps so that you can actually improve your skill as a leader. That's what we're about. We're here to help you become a better leader by giving you access to lots of different perspectives. By giving you access to lots of different perspectives. The guests are varied. We're thrilled to have them. Get out your pen, get out your paper and be ready to learn Every single episode. You're going to be able to take something away that you can implement. Are you ready? Let's get to work. Well, hey there. Welcome back to the People Gardener podcast. I'm Rhonda Delaney, your host, also known as the People Gardener, and we have Betsy Sabatini back today to do a little deeper dive into Zoom For those that are just catching this one. Betsy, why don't you introduce yourself and your history and what?
Speaker 2:it is that you do. Thank you so much, Rhonda. I'm really just so happy to be here and yes, for those of you who are meeting me for the first time, I am Betsy Sabatini. I am known as the Zoom expert, but I'm a technology educator and coach and I've been teaching people how to use technology for over 35 years, so it's what I've always done. It's what I love to do.
Speaker 2:About five years ago, when the world shut down abruptly in 2020, and I had a number of people contact me, request that they couldn't work without doing something virtually. So I got many calls that, I say, changed the trajectory of my business, where now I am 100% virtual, and in doing so, I am now helping business professionals, entrepreneurs, business owners, solopreneurs, even businesses who have brick and mortar have brick and mortar and want to add on this virtual piece so that you can grow your audience exponentially. Think about it you could have a hundred people in here, and even if you have the free version of Zoom, you could have a hundred people in here. So with that, I put all my tech expertise together and I created a number of products and services that are video-based and some are live, and then I do on-demand People request solutions from me.
Speaker 2:So the last episode if you go back and watch that or listen in we went over an overview of how to engage, Because I love you to know that Zoom is not the place necessarily where you're going to get fatigued. If you talk for an hour straight, your participants most likely will get fatigued, especially if they have to stay on camera like this and active. I mean, it is very difficult to stay in your seat like this for that amount of time. So we went over some of these features that Zoom has and strategies like how you use them, how you can incorporate them. Well now, in this deep dive, see, I didn't show you how to make sure they're on, and Rhonda was sharing with me. She's like you know what I was following along and I didn't have that button in my Zoom. So where is that? And that's where I'm going to take you next.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've got pen and paper. I'm old school, you know, pushing 65, and I'm a pen and paper kind of gal. So I've got it ready here. I'm going to be taking notes because I know that I need to work at my Zoom setup.
Speaker 2:You got it. Paper and pen or pencil works great. And even since this is being recorded and if you're listening in, you can certainly take notes and say, wow, I've got to go, look for that. Watch back on the YouTube channel and I would advise you to watch this on a device that you can then have your computer open as well and then you can pause the recording when I get to a spot, and you can then have your computer open as well, and then you can pause the recording when I get to a spot and you can go find it in your own Zoom account. So I think that'll let you follow along in a way that you can just get yourself set up for success by the end of this episode.
Speaker 2:So let's start you off then in. What I going to tell you is the Zoom web portal. Okay, it's on the web. You're going to go to zoomus and you're going to log in to your account. So let me just take you back a minute. This is what zoomus or zoomcom looks like. So this is their website, and in the upper right corner of that site there's a lot going on. Here. They have a lot of products and services they want to tell you about. But in the upper right corner, the blue button says my account, and that's because I'm already signed in. If you're watching right now and you don't even have a Zoom account, that's going to say sign in, and there's also going to be a place for you to create a free account. And so go ahead and do that, because you can follow along to about three quarters of what I'm going to teach you. There are some features you're going to see that are only for those of you who pay for Zoom, and so if you're listening in and you're like, wow, I really want to up my game, you could pay for Zoom for just one month, or $15, and you can use Zoom that way. So plan it accordingly. When you know you're going to have that event, have it, you know, at the end of that four week period. You know it doesn't have to be an exact calendar month, but for that four week period, and if it has to, you pay for, maybe pay for two months tops.
Speaker 2:Once you're signed in, you're going to click my account and that's what comes up here. This is the area where your account information is stored, and so if you look down the left-hand side of this screen and as you look at that left-hand side of the screen, you're going to scroll all the way down, because if you're the owner of the account, you're going to see this section that says admin that's only for you You're the owner and you're going to notice a section that says account management. Because that's what we're doing we're making sure our account is managed, and many online accounts have this feature. You're either going to go into your settings, your profile, your account management. You want to make sure your contact information is correct and in Zoom, when you get down here on the left sidebar, you're going to go all the way down to account settings bar. You're going to go all the way down to account settings.
Speaker 2:So now that I've navigated you here appropriately, I want you to look on the right side of the screen, from left to right, and there are items across that screen. From left to right, you see AI companion. Yes, ai is now infused or integrated into Zoom. There's also some general information which sometimes is not going to apply to you because you don't use Zoom for your phone. They actually have a Zoom phone, so there are going to be some features. You're going to see that you're like ah, that's not me, but everybody listening in and watching. I want you to go to meeting and, if you need a moment right now, to just pause this video and then get your computer out and do what I've said so far. I would advise that.
Speaker 2:So, once you're logged in and you see account settings on the left and then you see meeting on the right, now we're going to just scroll down through here and talk about some of the items. Scroll down through here and talk about some of the items. Now they're broken up into sections, this top area being what's called general, and then the next section, which is for security. So each of these sections has this little gray bar that goes across. You'll also see those sections listed here in this little sub menu. So if you ever want to get back to your security options, you can go right here to security.
Speaker 2:And what is security? Why do I have to be secure? Well, back in 2020, I'll give you a little history when Zoom came on the scene in the middle of the pandemic, everybody was using it and there was this boom in accounts that people were creating and there was a term back then that we heard where people would Zoom bomb. They could Zoom bomb. It was taken from the term when you photo bomb someone. So you might be on the streets of Manhattan or a big city Chicago, los Angeles, miami, and all these people hustle and bustle and you see someone taking a picture and you kind of like stick your finger in or you photo bomb them. Well, this was happening in Zoom meetings. But people were coming into a Zoom meeting that they were not invited to and then they were causing whatever havoc they could by sounds or putting a photo up that was inappropriate and then they were getting out. So people were like, oh, this is messing up my meeting. So Zoom said all right, we're going to make it extra secure.
Speaker 2:Then you have to have a passcode on your meeting so that passcode is only shared with people who are invited. And if you don't have a passcode, well then you have to have this waiting room, and the waiting room is the place where you, as the person who created the event, can see who has arrived. But they're not admitted yet. So you can actually look through all of the names and compare it to your registration list and you can just admit them one-on-one. So almost like if they came to your lobby of your building you didn't let them into the conference room unless they actually signed up, so you would have registration table out front. So it's very much like that. So the security features you have to have one of those two. You can have both, which is what I do. I have a passcode and I have the waiting room. Then, as long as you pass those requirements, then you can create a meeting and send out invites for people to attend.
Speaker 2:So this section right here where you see waiting room, you want to make sure these blue little switches it's like an on off switch. If you see anything that's grayed out or is a charcoal gray color, that means it's not on. And those are the items I want you to look for as you scroll through and I'm going to point out for best practices, the ones that you should have on. So so far, that's waiting room and that's meeting passcode. And just a little teaser is that in the waiting room options area there's some titles underneath that are actually lit up with blue, meaning you can click them, and if you don't have to, right now I'm not going to go into them in detail, but inside there is a way that you can customize what people see, and that's what I was talking about.
Speaker 2:If you go back to the first episode, we were talking about branding and how important it is to have these virtual events where people feel comfortable and energized and they know exactly who they're talking to or listening to. You can actually have a video greet people before they're actually admitted. Think about it you can have a promotional video of all of your upcoming events and they're waiting to get into your event and they're seeing a video of you talking and showing us what else that you provide. So it's a great way, and that's all listed inside there. I am going to skip over a lot of text on the screen that doesn't apply to us, because Zoom is an application that's used all over the world and used with all different types of computers, types of devices, and so sometimes you want to customize it to your own equipment, and so I'm going to skip over a lot of those that pertains to your particular office equipment. But you could certainly contact me on the side and I can help you with those specific strategies.
Speaker 2:But as we scroll down a little bit more, you can see here that the next section I want you to pay attention to, and I'm going to buy a lot of these that are turned off.
Speaker 2:As long as they're signed up and you meet them in the waiting room, then they can be admitted.
Speaker 2:So that's why a lot of these are off, no-transcript. The other thing I want you to know with the chat is this next set of features you can see that when you schedule the meeting you can indicate whether a person's video is going to be on or off when they enter. And that doesn't mean that they can't turn it on when they get inside there, but it means how you want their initial entry into your Zoom to be. So if you want it to be the participant's video to be on, then you can switch them here. Video to be on, then you can switch them here. If they're on here, it means every time that you have a meeting, that's the starting point. Whatever you see here, that's the starting point. It doesn't mean that it can't be changed, but it means that's the starting point. So it saves you the time from every time you're scheduling a new meeting having to switch it at that point. This just says, if I have it on here, it's on for every single meeting that I schedule.
Speaker 1:What you're doing right here is basically deciding what ingredients are going into the recipe for your Zoom meetings.
Speaker 2:Yes, you can look at it as ingredients. You can look at it. Another good analogy is like a switch box in your basement, in your building, or what the super does in your building, and they have a switch box and in order to have certain settings or lighting or heating or feature turned on on a certain floor, that switch has to be on. If it's off in here, rhonda, you will not see it, even available to you in the meeting when you're live. And on top of that, when you're live and all your people are coming in, even if you go over here on a separate screen and you turn it on, it doesn't affect the meeting until the next live meeting. Yep, you would actually have to end the meeting you're in, which some people have done with me, if they brought me in to troubleshoot or to strategize or to be their launch wing woman, which I have done. Come on, bring Betsy in. She's going to help you on the side, and I see that if they didn't consult with me prior, if I see that they don't have a feature on, I say you would have to tell everyone. Just for the moment we're going to end. Just use the same exact link in about five minutes and we'll be back on the air. So that's something like that. But as I always say, if you set yourself up for success ahead of time, that means going through here like an audit. You just audit your own account. Make sure you have on what you need, then you'll be all set up. And I don't mean going through and just switch on everything. That's not necessarily the answer.
Speaker 2:This next one here says allow participants to join before the host. So for those of you out there who meet with your teams, maybe they're spread out over a rural area. That happens a lot in many states where I consult with businesses and you wanna bring people together in a virtual event so they don't have to drive to your brick and mortar. Well, in some cases people want. Well, I hosted it, I created the link because we're all part of this association, but I can't be there for the day that, for that specific day. Maybe we meet every second Monday of the month, but I'm the one that hosted it.
Speaker 2:As long as you have this option on and you can see where it says participants can join anytime, then you don't even have to be there as long as you don't have the waiting room on, because then they'll get stuck in the waiting room where you can only admit them. And this is how I say you can actually host a Zoom without being there as long as you have this feature on, and so it becomes where your room, your Zoom classroom, your Zoom meeting room, is the meeting space and you don't even have to be there. Really great feature. Zoom classroom, your Zoom meeting room is the meeting space and you don't even have to be there. Really great feature. If you have that kind of co-working situation and then along with that, you might want to indicate that your chat is a continuous chat, meaning the chat doesn't end when the live meeting ends. As long as you turn that on, and if you're the kind of group or team or town hall or association that meets consecutively recurring meetings, this chat will continue. Very nice feature. And even people who can't make it live if they have set up the Zoom application on their computer or their phone, they can actually follow along in the chat and they're not even in there live, all right. So the next section you're going to go past these watermarks does not apply to us today. Certainly does apply to some people out there, but not what we're talking about today. And then we get to this next section where you see my blue little switch and that's muting people when they join a meeting. Another good best practice Think about it when you open the doors to your virtual event and everybody's coming in. If someone is in a situation maybe a coffee shop, maybe they're in their home where their dog's barking, maybe a child is talking or crying they don't mean to disrupt, maybe they're moving their chair or they're coughing. They don't know that they're not muted. If you set this mute all participants when they join then when everybody enters your virtual meeting room, they're muted and it creates a very nice entry. It's very quiet, you can make your announcements and then, of course, you can have a part where you want to have introductions or Q&A Great best practice to mute participants upon entry.
Speaker 2:Aside from your meeting scheduling, I will bring your attention here to the meeting chat. We had it up above where we had chat etiquette tool. This is where you actually want to have that sidebar. If you go back to the first episode where I talked about when you want to be able to engage with people in the chat, you want them to type where they're from, type their name, answer questions, put an emoji. Well, all of these settings have to be on then. So you're going to indicate that it's on. You get to indicate in here whether it's private or not.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you to think about this situation when people are in your town hall and it's virtual and they're putting questions in the chat and they're seeing like I'm seeing what Rhonda put in the chat, do you want me to be able to privately chat Rhonda and not have anybody else see that? Well, that's a setting in here. If you don't want that, many hosts will tell me. No, I would like everything that's in the chat to be seen by everyone. And so here it says you not only can allow participants to save it, to delete what they put in, to edit what they put in, to put emojis in.
Speaker 2:In the bottom part here it says meeting chat, direct messages. Do you want them to be able to DM them as well? Like private, I don't. That's why mine's off. So you see that one right there. I don't want people to be able to private chat. They can exchange information and meet on the side, but during my classes, if there's a question or if someone's trying to&A, I'd rather the chat to be public to everyone and then just some of these other settings here is that when the meeting is over, you can actually have a saved version of the chat automatically sent to your computer, your folder. There's a part when you have Zoom installed on your computer and you will when you start running and hosting Zoom meetings. There is a part of your computer and where your documents are kept, there's a Zoom folder there. It's put there, zoom puts it there and then you get a folder for every single meeting you either attend or you host and then all of this information will end up on your local computer.
Speaker 2:The other parts in the chat, just one more piece. There it says send files. When we spoke in the first episode, we were talking about the overview of engaging tools and one of them, I said, is providing resources and you can use the chat to provide a handout. You can provide a whole presentation if you want to, and you can actually put these files a PDF, a graphic image you can actually put those in the chat, as long as that feature is turned on there. So that's a good example. If it's off right here, see right here this little switch. If that's off, I'm just going to disable it for now I'm going to turn it back on. But right there, if it says send files via meeting chat, if that's off, you're not even going to have the capability when you're in your live Zoom meeting. So these are the when you think through. You are designing your meeting of your dreams and what do you want to have happen? What kind of engaging activities do you want to have happen in that Zoom meeting?
Speaker 1:Whatever, in my head as we've been going here. This is designing for them, folks that are coming to the meeting, but it's also designing for you in what is going to be helpful for you with regards to data in order to improve the next one. So it's both sides very clear.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it is part of designing it. And I like you to think about your brick and mortar all of you out there who have events at your building or at someone else's building or at a conference hall that you rent out and, in the weeks coming up to the event, think of all the things you do about what you want to have set up what kind of tables, how big are they, where are they gonna be placed? Will there be a projector? Will there be a screen? Will there be well, you might even have the directions to where the restrooms are. All that preparation ahead of time about what you want, so that the people coming have a wonderful experience. It's the same thing in here. And in order to have these engaging tools the whiteboard, the reactions, the look at this one here there's a setting for co-hosts, polls and quizzes, the meeting survey. So everything I was talking about that is so fantastic and increases engagement in your Zoom meeting. If these are off, rhonda, you can't even use them. You won't even have the button in your menu when you're in your Zoom meeting. So it's like getting into an event where you said, oh, we should have provided a big table to put all our stuff on at the front of the room, like it's just like that. And, yes, in a physical, in-person situation you can go, pull a table in and bring it into the room, but when you're in your live zoom meeting and this button's not there, you can't magically have it appear.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, it's the way this works, and so that's why I really I help people to go through this and to decide what's needed. That's the first thing. The second thing is I always am telling people your best practice. The recommendation is that weeks ahead of time, you go through here and you check it out. Just check it out to see what's on and what's off. And I do have a little gift, a little ebook that I put together and I'll provide that to Rhonda and you can figure out how to get that to everybody. But I walk you through all of these so that you can keep track of, you know what do I want to have on and what do I want to have off, so that that note-taking that you're doing is meaningful, and then you can go back to it. If you want to print it out, then you have a record of what you turned on and what you turned off, so that you know.
Speaker 1:So question do you tweak or change these with any frequency, or are you pretty much this is my default and you leave it alone?
Speaker 2:It's that one. This pretty much is my default and I leave it alone with the exception. There's always an exception when Zoom comes out with an update and if you get on my email list, if you take the gift today, there's a way you can put your email in and I send out email when Zoom updates, and that's usually about once a month, sometimes it's every two months, but when Zoom updates, then something new appears in here. It's like it's like on the phones, like every now and then I'll go in.
Speaker 2:I was showing somebody something on the iPhone the other day about how she had so many notifications popping up on her phone all the time.
Speaker 2:I was helping her side by side and I said, first of all, side note, doesn't that bother you?
Speaker 2:She's like, yeah, but I don't know how to turn it off, and so we went into the phone and I'm doing it while she's doing it, and so I'm going through it.
Speaker 2:I was like, oh my gosh, when I added that app, I didn't even know that it came into my phone with notifications on. So it's like that when something is added, it's either on or off, it's one or the other, and you might want to just come in and tweak it, and so that's when I come back in here, but for most of the time, with the exception of the waiting room, rhonda, I change my waiting room with every big event because I want those people who are coming in to see hear the messaging for that event. Maybe I'm telling them hey, I'm so glad you're here, I can't wait to see you inside. Make sure that you have the following with you, like, so I might change that messaging make sure that you have the following with you, like, so I might change that messaging. And so I come in here frequently for that, as well as for the ai pieces, the meeting summaries, the those things are in here as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense all right.
Speaker 2:So, like I said, we're not going to be going through through all of these, but I want to jump down to the areas.
Speaker 2:If you were listening in on our first episode, rhonda, I believe you shared that there were some items I was going through that you didn't have on your screen yeah and one of them was the reactions, and so I'm going to show you something I'm going to scroll all the way back to the top just to make a point of this that, first of all, there's a lot of settings in here. Second of all, there is a box at the top, a search box. So if you heard me say something in the first episode and now you're on your computer and you're like I have no idea where that is, but you remember the keyword like, for instance, reactions, if you search on that keyword, zoom will search this entire screen for that setting. And so, rhonda, I'd like you to put reaction in. If you have it open on your screen. If you don't, all of you you might want to just pause this video right now. And if you're on YouTube and then just put reaction in, okay, great. So now you can see, as I scroll down, every part where it found reaction was highlighted in orange. So there were two spots in particular, but it brought me right to that section.
Speaker 2:So, first of all, these were the emojis we talked about. Some were animated, some were temporary, the ones that appear in the corner of our video. There was this one show, the raised hand in the toolbar. That's a new one. People used to have to hunt for that. How do I raise my hand? Somebody asked me that in a webinar the other day. That's a digital hand. A little picture of a hand comes up and then your video pops up for the host. But here it is Rhonda nonverbal feedback. When you turn this one on, you're going to get that little green circle and the little red circle. So for those of you who listened to my scenario about running a casual poll, here's a best practice. Just make sure these three are on and you're in business. The only other little settings you see are do you want to give them availability to animated reactions and allow them to use the floating video? That's where the emojis they sort of float up their screen. I would say, yes, that's fun. I would say yes, it adds a bit of fun, it takes away that fatigue. So that's a great tip where you use that search box at the top. And so here I'm going to do it again.
Speaker 2:The other thing I talked about in the first episode was breakout rooms. So if you put the word breakout in there, then it just finds the spots on the screen. It's not too many of them, but if you don't do this and you find yourself scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and you're like where is it? And it can really elude, it can really like hide itself, this makes it really easy to go find it. So you want to make sure, definitely make sure these are on and make sure all of these check marks are checked off. Why? Because this lets you assign people into breakouts even before they arrive, if you know the group coming and you know you want to pair people together by, maybe, region or skill or activity. And then the other three check marks are for how you use the breakout so you can broadcast a message to them when they're in there, you can broadcast your voice and you can create, rename and delete breakouts when they're in progress. These are all things you haven't learned yet, but I'm telling you as a best practice, check all these off and then when I come in to teach you breakout rooms, you're gonna have them on and that way you'll be able to use all these features for sure. Okay, beautiful. And then you can just clear out that search at the top and then notice that this sidebar here, when you go to the advanced, see how there's. We did security, we did scheduling, we did the basic and then there's advanced and that scrolls you right to this portion of the screen. See that? And all of these settings are important, so I'm not going to go through all of these. All of these like they're little extras, like you can actually use gesture. Let me see if I can do it. We're live here there. My hand just came up I don't know if on our recording, but I'm raising my physical hand and Zoom understood the gesture and it put up the digital hand so that Rhonda is alerted as the host that my hand is up. What it also allows me to do is I can put up the thumbs, like the thumbs up and the gesture. There it goes. It understands the. That's just an emoji reaction. So because gesture recognition is on, it allows me to do that.
Speaker 2:You can allow people to transfer the meeting between devices. Here's the scenario. This happened to me. I was doing work in Kansas city and there was not very good weather and we got delayed, and so I wasn't able to get to my office to start the Zoom from my computer, so I started it from my phone. I have the Zoom app on my phone and I scheduled the meeting. So the meeting's listed. It's the same Zoom account on my phone as it is on the computer. I was being driven there in an Uber, so I'm on the phone with my headset and I'm saying hi to everybody and I'm starting the introductions and luckily I asked someone else to lead a screen share just because of the situation. Then, when I got to my office, I did this. I transferred the meeting between the devices. That's what that setting is on. Opened up my computer, logged into my Zoom account, it saw that I was in a meeting that I scheduled and it had a little button there that said switch. And then I just click switch, it ends on my phone and it comes up on my computer. Definitely a best practice. Even if you don't move about like I do, you never know when you might lose connectivity to your computer and you might need your phone cell service to maybe keep a meeting going. So I would definitely use that one.
Speaker 2:You can also use some of these settings in here to manage your participants. Manage your participants, and some of the classes that I teach are specifically on that how to manage your meeting room, how to manage participants so that you feel that you can keep everyone muted. You know, move people about so that they're comfortable, and a lot of these settings help you do that, allowing them to rename themselves. There are times when people arrive and if they're on a mobile device, their mobile device is their name and it says you know, iphone 5, 2, 3, 4, 5. It's not their phone number, it's just like the device number, and so you allow them to rename themselves and they can do that easily. You just tell them where to click up here in their little video thumbnail, there's like a little three dots icon there. You probably won't see it here on the recording, but you can lead them through that. If you can't find it, go into your settings, because it's most likely, the reason is that this is not on. So then, finally, we round it out with this area at the bottom, which is the advanced settings, and the advanced settings are other than breakouts.
Speaker 2:There are transcripts. You can transcribe your meeting. You can provide captions, great for accessibility, meaning ADA requirements, and very important if you need it to be able to turn on closed captioning for some of your participants. You can even provide it, that where the captions can be saved and a transcript can be saved for a participant who needs it? Who needs to read what the discussion was? Because they weren't able to hear it. There are some language interpretations and sign language, so I don't have those turned on for my audiences, but if you teach in an area where it's bilingual, you can turn on and even in the free Zoom accounts you can have language interpretation where the captions are shown in their language.
Speaker 2:And then that brings me down to the bottom here, and once you see that little Golden Gate Bridge and that little space needle and there's like a little beach scene, so I always say that's like tells you that you've gotten close to the bottom of the list. You know if you go past, you know you haven't gone too far, but you know you're near the bottom. And when you get there, those are your virtual backgrounds. And I like people to go in here because if you want to brand your Zoom meeting, you can actually you load in so that's called uploading, where you take your own logo, your own colored background, and then you load it in here and it becomes available to you. Then all of your other employees also have the same branded coloring and logo as their virtual background. And I want you to look right above there there's an option that says meeting HD video quality. So right there it's the top one on my screen meeting HD video quality.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm going to get a little technical with you right now, in that I've been teaching you tech, but I haven't really been talking about technical terms per se, like your camera equipment and the quality of recordings and the quality of sound, like all of that is really a whole nother animal, you know, it's a whole nother conversation about making your Zoom quality, and when we talk about recordings because there's a simple button that you just click record and this meeting is being recorded and you can record it to your local computer or you can record it up to the Zoom cloud I want to make sure that you choose a high definition, so a higher quality resolution to that recording, and in order to get that, you have to turn on this HD video quality, and it's very possible that it's not on.
Speaker 2:I do want you to know, though, that it will require better internet connection, so all of this is a best practice if you want to have a quality zoom meeting. You want to be shown here live quality and then have your recordings quality. You want to make sure that these settings are on, but that it is going to require some higher internet speeds as well. So that's definitely.
Speaker 1:What you're saying here is that even if your camera, your whatever you're recording yourself with is a high def, if you don't have this setting on, you got problems that's correct.
Speaker 2:Yep, because and it's and this, this has been in conversations inside what you know people have asked questions about Zoom. Those who have used it have come back and said hey, why is my Zoom not a good quality? And there's a couple of other reasons that if you're using a free Zoom account, or even the paid one, so the and I actually I'm going to have to look this up now that I say that out loud but there is a, there's a level of quality that comes with the version of the zoom account that you have, and and even the one that's where I wanted to go even the one that is the paid, where you're paying about, you know, $150 a year. It comes with and I'm going to say only a year. It comes with and I'm going to say only, and the term is 720p. That's like when we say quality, you know, like when you measure your cholesterol and you get like certain numbers that you know are good or bad and what, or your blood pressure, you know like the numbers are like good or bad. That's the analogy I'm going to use. And when I talk to you in terms of of camera quality and recording quality, you're going to hear 720p, 720, and you're going to hear 1080p, 1080. So those two numbers, and when you're inside a pro account or lower, you're going to have 720 or lower, and so you definitely want to boost it any way you can, because 720 isn't the best quality for like a huge, large widescreen projection. Okay, so let's round it out with the.
Speaker 2:We're at the bottom now of the advanced settings, and a little bit more about virtual backgrounds involves something called filters. A filter is going to be where you can actually put a logo on your screen but the background looks natural, pretty cool, so like it's an overlay. That's a filter. Video filter. There's some really fun ones they can make. You can make it look like you have a little Daisy in your hair or you're wearing sunglasses, or do you remember in the news when someone made themselves look like a cat and then it was very common like in 2020 or 2021. So those are filters, where they it makes you look like you have lipstick or you have a pirate's patch, or those are called filters. The business related ones are video filters, where you can actually put your logo up on the screen and you don't have that colored background behind you, and a lot of people love that because it kind of gives you this halo around your head when you do the full virtual background, but when you do the filter then it only shows a little bit of it. I can actually change mine if you want me to give you an example of a filter. Before I do that, though, I'll just show you that some other things that affect the view inside your meeting which you might want to have turned on is that you can turn yourself into an avatar A lot of fun. You can have people who make themselves look like A lot of fun. You can have people who make themselves look like an animated character inside your Zoom meeting. You can also have something that's called immersive view, where it looks like everyone is in a virtual setting. So avatars and virtual settings that's why it's all in the same section here. But this is the one I wanted to get to, and then we'll wrap it up and I'll show you some of my filters.
Speaker 2:This one's called focus mode and I a best practice is to have it turned on. It doesn't mean that it's on all the time. It means that it gives you the capability to turn your Zoom meeting into an environment that has more focus. So what it means is when everyone is in a zoom meeting and they have the capability to turn their camera on, and they can turn their camera off. Well, when most of the cameras are on and you're looking around that whole gallery we called it like Hollywood squares or Brady Bunch mode, like all the squares and you're looking around, you can you can get distracted. So you stop listening to the presenter because you're looking at like, oh, what does Rhonda have behind her there? I wonder what that is, you know when you're like getting distracted.
Speaker 2:So what you can do for maybe just the 10 minutes while you're presenting is you can turn on focus mode and what happens is everyone's camera goes off to each other, but they're still seen by the host and the co-hosts. So the participants don't see each other, but they still see the host, they still see the co-hosts and the host and co-hosts still see them. All they see are people's names. They don't see any live. They don't even see a profile picture. To get distracted by that too. So it's a really great. It's a really great feature.
Speaker 2:You can even schedule your Zoom meeting to start in focus mode. So I tell a lot of people, and I believe this one you need a paid account for so and I'm this one you need a paid account for so and I'm going to tell you this one you could actually bypass the $80 a month for webinars, like some people pay the extra $80 or 99 a month for webinars or zoom sessions. To have a webinar where you have panelists and everybody's off off camera and they can't even turn on their camera, have panelists and everybody's off off camera and they can't even turn on their camera. And I always say, with focus mode, it's like you get a webinar style meeting at a meeting price. So that's a really good one. Really good one too.
Speaker 2:Let me come out of here and, just as a little show and tell when you go into your, your video setting. So I just showed if you turn on that video filter that I was like so wild and crazy about. I made one of these for one of my classes. Where I turn on oopsie, I turn on a filter. That's not it and the filter is an overlay.
Speaker 1:Ah, there you go.
Speaker 2:So you can have it as a lower third. That's a very common term for like when we're looking at people on the news and they have their name. I also did one like this where I wanted to have instructions. I did this in Canva, where you, you pretty much you put the graphics on the screen and then you, you have a way of saving it to your computer without a background. This was another one where I just shift my, just shift my seat, just shift my seat, and it's kind of like I'm in a fancy studio with this information right beside me.
Speaker 2:And this is an overlay. This could be a white box and then you could write on the screen. It's a pretty cool feature and it's available to you in your video settings and it's as easy as going to your backgrounds and effects and then just turning it on or off. So, again, if you don't go through your settings where we just were and have those features turned on, you can't come back here and have it available to you. It's like turn it on in the settings so that you have it available.
Speaker 1:Wow, this is. It's been wonderful. I feel like I'm probably 70, 80% there as far as my settings are concerned, so I'm actually patting myself on the back beautiful oh yay, for those of you listening, she just used the floating emoji of the gave her some the celebration.
Speaker 2:That's right, I gave her some celebration. No sound effect, just some visual, so it does. It's like. If you're listening in, go watch the youtube, yeah exactly, you can see it so yes, well, bravo ronda, that's excellent okay, well, thank you so much all of these things.
Speaker 1:I'm not a detail person, I'm an overview, big picture person. So having somebody share why getting into the weeds in the details of your settings is important is really, really helpful for those of us that are detail averse.
Speaker 2:Beautiful. It is exactly that. If you or your listeners out there are desiring a fantastic virtual event, it most likely is possible, and so it just comes from, first of all, going through that list and writing down your questions and coming up with things that are like oh wow, that was off. Now you've learned some things today that you know if I turn that on, I'm going to be able to do that. And that's where you start.
Speaker 1:Yeah, turn that on. I'm going to be able to do that, and that's where you start. Yeah, Well, just to make sure that everybody knows that in the description of the podcast episode and also the YouTube episode will be Betsy's ebook link that you'll be able to go and get some more good information and be able to be on her list so that when updates happen in Zoom you will be notified. So thank you so much for sharing everything.
Speaker 2:You're so very welcome and I hope to be able to meet some of you. Actually, I have some free events coming up, so if you get on that, they're not until March and April. So if you get on that list, you'll get information about that as well. And I also have a Facebook community, so if you get the ebook, it'll lead you all into my areas where I show up and I do some free live webinars, usually once a week inside the Facebook group. So thank you so much, rhonda. This has been a real pleasure. I really enjoy your questions and your conversation. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Very good. Okay, that's it for this week, folks. We'll talk to you again next week. Well, thanks for joining me today. Just a quick reminder if you were not on my email list, go to my website, rondadelaneycom, and there's a place there that you can subscribe. Keep you up to date on all things people, gardening and leadership.