Participating in a Webinar

Today I had my introduction to presenting a full-blown one hour long webinar for Legacy Family Tree. My other participation online has been in the form of interviews with some interaction with the interviewer. You can read about it and get a copy of the CD here. 

First of all, the lack of feed-back is sort-of like talking to yourself. You know when you are talking on a digital phone system and the other person stops talking and you can't tell if you are still on the line? So you keep saying, "Are you still there?" Well, you can't say are you still there when you are talking over the computer connection, you have to take your audience on faith. I have taught literally hundreds of classes and I usually gauge what I say to the audience reaction. This was more like rehearsing than presenting.

Geoff Rasmussen of Legacy Family Tree was exceptionally patient with me, especially because I was using my iMac with Parallels Desktop and the sound quality wasn't so great from my end. Geoff suggested that the problem might have been the headset I was using and now that I think about it, I was pretty well convinced that it was at least partially the headset. But the audio problems was extremely elusive. The software used for the webinar apparently didn't work directly with my iMac. This is surprising because I attend two or three webinars a week while working on the Support Team for the FamilySearch Research Wiki and have no problems at all being heard or hearing and all that is done directly on my iMac not on the PC side.

I am grateful for all the kind comments about the presentation. I will be presenting in the following conferences in the next few weeks:

Next week, I will be in Yuma, Arizona, a very nice place to be in January. On January 14, 2012, the Yuma Family History Center is sponsoring a one-day conference. I will be giving the keynote address for the opening and teaching two classes.

The next week starts off with another conference in Yuma, this one sponsored by Family History Expos and the Yuma Genealogical Society on January 17, 2012. I will present two classes at this one-day conference. It remains to be seen how much blogging I can do in a one day seminar. But I will at least give everyone a recap of the events.

That weekend, on January 20 and 21, 2012, we will be in Mesa for another Family History Expo, Arizona Family History Expo 2012.  I will be presenting two more classes and keeping everyone informed with my blogging.

Jumping to February, I will be back up at RootsTech in Salt Lake City, Utah on February 2, 3 and 4, 2012 as both a presenter and a featured Blogger. I expect that there will be even more people at this huge conference. The last time I checked the site, they had plans for over 100 presentations over the three-day conference. RootsTech is the have-to-go-to conference of the year.  I will be blogging merrily away all during the conference. I will also be helping out with the FamilySearch Research Wiki support and helping with the FamilySearch TechTips booth at RootsTech.

My current list of conferences winds up on February 24, 25 2012 in sunny St. George, Utah for another Family History Expo, St. George Family History Expo 2012. I am presenting two more classes and participating on a panel. 

 

I have two huge scanning projects starting and need to work on them also.