10 Things I Learned When I Recorded a Lecture on Zoom

On Saturday morning, for the first time ever, I recorded a lecture on Zoom.  It was a guest lecture for a friend who teaches a class at a local university. Afterwards, she sent me a link to the recording, so I got to critique my own performance. Wow, did I learn!

Because everyone is scrambling right now to shift meetings and classes online, I thought there might be some value to sharing my experience for the benefit of all.  I hope these lessons learned and tips make you feel more confident in the coming days and weeks when you need to present on Zoom or any other video conferencing platform.

1. Don’t be the host 

If you are the primary presenter, have someone else be the host.  There are several reasons this is a good idea. First, the other person can deal with the tech, and you can focus on your presentation. For example they can monitor the chat thread in case someone is saying, “There’s no audio!” Or if you are recording, they can manage hitting “record”, “pause”, and “stop” at the appropriate times.

The host can also help by speaking up.  This does a couple of things things. It gives the audience a break from watching a single speaker (it gives you a break, too!). It also lets the host act as a model for the behavior you want to see from the audience.  Once the host asks a question, others will feel free to do the same.

For my recorded guest lecture, it was just the professor and me in the conference. She periodically asked questions or added a point.  She was also unintentionally modelling another good practice for the students who would later view the video by clearly taking notes during my talk!

2. Be aware of your body movements

Good speakers use gestures naturally during a presentation, and I learned that I have work to do to become a really good speaker!  Here are a couple of suggestions for making gestures that add to the presentation instead of distracting.

Don’t move your head around a lot.  I noticed that I was leaning in to look at my presentation slides on my computer monitor, so my head kept getting BIGGER and smaller and BIGGER and smaller. Very distracting! I recommend making text on the screen big enough that you can see it without leaning in.

Do make hand gestures, but keep your hands close to your body.  When I made gestures close to my computer screen, my hands looked bigger than my head.  In other words, try to avoid looking like the Swedish chef from the Muppets.

3. Slow down

Speak more slowly than you think you need to, and pause longer if you ask a question. Just like speaking in front of an audience, speaking in front of a camera can be a little nerve wracking.  It’s natural to talk fast when you are nervous. My pace sounded much faster when I watched myself presenting than it seemed when I was giving the presentation. I also noticed that my pace increased as the presentation went along.  

If you do ask your audience a question, which is a great way to create a pause and get people engaged, pause longer than you think you need to so people can reflect.  I asked questions even though I knew my audience would be watching a recording. There’s no reason someone can’t reflect while watching a video. When you ask a question, try counting slowly to five afterwards. It seems like forever when you are the speaker, but when watching (and thinking) the pause goes by quickly!

4. Consider silence instead of a silence filler like “um”

Ok , this is a tough one, I’ll admit.  When I watched the recording of my presentation, I said, “um” and “ah” plenty of times. But when I gave the presentation, I did consciously try to reduce the number of times I said it.  This just takes practice, but it’s worth practicing. Remember that the silence is going to sound much longer to you than to your audience!

5. Tell stories

Do tell stories! It might seem like you are straying from your presentation bullet points, but a story is another way to give your audience a break. We humans love stories, and our brains are wired to easily take them in.  One of the stories I told to illustrate a point during my presentation felt long as I was telling it. But when I watched myself, it looked very natural and didn’t seem anywhere near as long as I remembered!

Remember that the best stories are related to the material you are presenting, and drive your message home rather than distracting from it.  For example, the story about your quarantine dance party might be hilarious, but it isn’t helping your audience understand your key points.

6. Share visuals from different sources

Don’t spend the entire presentation moving forward through your slide presentation. Zoom makes it easy to toggle back and forth between applications open on your desktop.  And you don’t have to show your computer desktop to do it. This is another way to add variety to the presentation and keep your audience engaged.

However, use care when zooming in and out or panning from side to side.  I shared Google Earth, and I noticed when I quickly zoomed in and out that the visual in the recording was a little choppy.

7. Use humor to move past unexpected interruptions

Use humor to overcome unexpected interruptions (like when my dog started barking madly at someone outside our front door). But don’t spend too much time focused on the interruption. When I watched my presentation, I found that my prolonged reaction to the situation was much more distracting than the interruption itself!

8. Stop apologizing for the length of your presentation

Stop apologizing for how long your presentation is!  If there is no interaction with the audience, a presentation can feel like it’s dragging.  But saying things like, “We’re almost done, just a few more slides to go!” makes it sound like you don’t think the material is interesting and the audience has no reason to be engaged.  Just present as long as you need to to get the key points across and let your audience decide whether they are engaged or not!

9. Forgive yourself that it’s not perfect

Forgive yourself in advance for the fact that the presentation will not be perfect.  A Zoom meeting presentation or lecture is never going to be a TED talk. Those performances are fine-tuned and rehearsed for MONTHS.  Your presentation will be just as good as it needs to be to get the job done. And that’s perfectly ok!

10. Applaud yourself for learning something new!

Everyone is being forced to try new things during this challenging time. Even though we aren’t going to be perfect the first time, let’s remember to applaud ourselves for giving things a try!  And it doesn’t hurt to applaud others for going above and beyond these days, too.

Think of this as a tremendous time to learn, and to get better at new skills.  When we come through this, and we will, we’re all going to have some handy new video conferencing tech capabilities to use and put on our resumes.

I hope you found some of these lessons learned and tips for giving a Zoom presentation useful. Personally, I’m looking forward to my next one so I can work on some of these and improve my skills!

Has anyone else had lessons learned during a video-conference in the past few weeks?  Please tell me about it in the comments below – I would love to learn from your experiences, too!