The first webinars of the free Practical Ed Tech Creativity Conference will be broadcast tomorrow. These will be live presentations with time for Q&A. More than 500 people have registered to participate. If you are one of them, here are a few tips for getting the most out of webinars. These are tips I have shared in the past, but they are worth repeating.
1. Participate in live webinars, not just view them.
Every webinar platform has a sort of chat or question and answer function. Use it! Use it to ask the presenter questions. An experienced webinar presenter can answer questions in real time. Don’t be afraid to ask enlightening questions. Even when I attend webinars about things I am already familiar with, I try to think of what questions I want to ask. This forces me to tune and listen with more focus than when I just listened in the hope that something the presenter said would jump at me.
2. Close Facebook and take notes.
If I can’t attend the live version of a webinar, I still find great value in recorded webinars. When I watch recorded webinar, I focus on it in the same way as during a live session. That means closing Facebook and taking notes in my notebook. In that notebook I write the questions that I want to send to the presenter via e-mail.
3. Follow webinar ideas quickly.
When I participate in a webinar, my participation does not end until I actually trade with what I have just learned. Just like in a traditional classroom environment, it is important to try for yourself what has just been demonstrated for you. Do this as fast as you can.
Here is a video I made about these tips a few years ago.
[Embed] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN-k_BL-5sM [/ embed]
