Watching Webinars with a Group

There are three things to consider about group watching:

1. The Size of the Screen

You may wish to connect your laptop or computer to a large LCD or LED monitor. If there are many in the group, you may wish to use a data projector. But remember it is a web-based production not a DVD, so making it too big will lessen the quality.

(a)	Connect the monitor or projector via a VGA cable before you turn on your laptop.
(b)	Turn on the monitor or projector before you turn on the laptop. (The laptop needs to be aware of the second screen on boot-up in most cases.)
(c)	Turn on the laptop.
(d)	Right click on your desktop screen and select “Properties” or “Personalise”. You want to get to “Display” but various operating systems arrange this differently. Get to a place where you can see the computer has detected two screens. In Windows 7 this can be seen under “Display/Screen Resolution”.
(e)	Select the second screen and adjust the resolution to suit your second monitor or projector. There may be a tick box which asks you to extend your desktop onto that monitor. If you have ticked that box, your desktop will extend to the right of your laptop monitor.

The result is that any window you have open can be slid sideways to the right onto your monitor or projector, so the webinar screen can be moved over to the larger screen for all to see.

In this case, the little square on the bottom right of the web video will toggle to make your screen full size.


2. Making Chat Easily Accessed

Ideally the chat facility should stay on the laptop – ie screen one.

There is a blue text button “open video in second window” on the webcast page. This will pop up the web video screen separately into a new tab at the top of the page.

This tab can then be dragged across to the larger screen on its own and opened full screen using the enlarge icon at the bottom right of the window, thus enabling chat to be accessed on the laptop independently of the second screen.

3. Good Audio

You need to connect the audio output from your laptop into a suitable sound system. This may be some good computer speakers, or PA system of some kind. Make sure you have the correct cables ahead of time.


Important: The laptop, sound system and monitor or projector should be run off the same power source or you can have hum-loop problems. (This is easy to set up with a few power leads and a multiway box.)