For months now, we have been working on a series of Educational Grand Rounds with my Monday client, S’eclairer. The idea was that the professionals would have discussions about a topic along with the PA Students doing their residency with the practice. The process of making sure we can use hardware on the premesis has been interesting to get us to a point where I can proudly advertise our Monday workings.
Lately, one of our conversation leaders has been big on using slide shows along with the discussion. It’s her method, so we worked to integrate it.
Now, if you were doing a Webinar by yourself I would recommend using the Screenshare function of Google Hangouts to read it off of your own computer, all in one spot. But if you want the effect of being able to switch between the slides and a shot of yourself from a webcam to keep things interesting, it’s not the best option since it’s more invovled than a mouse click to switch. Since our hosts are not in a position to lead the technical side as well, and we have multiple people involved in one location, I had another method.
I have my old 2009 Macbook on hand, so I figured it would be enough to broadcast a static slideshow. So when I start the Hangout OnAir, I invite myself to the conversation.
I only have Keynote on my laptop, so I have to deal with format oddities from Powerpoint files, and I’m not sure how to eliminate the sidebars (I’m not in slideshow editors too regularly).
Now, I can look to the main computer broadcasting from the company’s account. I have a camera pointed at my hosts, and a slide show. This now becomes an active video switcher as I click on the shots.
Check out the results here:
This leads me to the idea: Why can’t we use multiple Hangouts as a multicam setup? As long as the bandwidth is there for several full quality streams…
