Have you ever presented a webcast? If you have, then I am sure you can relate to how hard it is to make your audience focus on your content. The problem with webcasting is that we cannot be sure as presenters, that our audience is focusing on a particular part of the screen. This is easy when you present in person, but during a webcast you have only your voice, your mouse, and your keyboard to try to make it work. Let me give you an example. Imagine that you are attending a webcast, where I am showing an Excel spreadsheet on my screen, and I am discussing the content of the cells in the upper left column. What happens if you are looking in the lower right corner of my screen? Well, by the time you realize that you need to look up to the left, I may have already changed my screen to show something else. As a presenter, I probably did not realize that you missed an important segment of my presentation.

If you are using PowerPoint presentations in your webcasts, then you are set, since PowerPoint has built-in functionality to draw annotations on the screen. You can also make the screen black/white and make free-hand drawings if necessary. Well, if you are NOT using PowerPoint, how can we get the same functionality? The answer is a little known free application called ZoomIT. This application was put together by the great Mark Russinovich from Sys Internals (recently bought up by Microsoft, who is still offering all of Mark’s applications for free as before). If you do not know about his work, you should go to Microsoft’s SysInternals site and check out all the other cool free applications. I can especially recommend PageDefrag, Process Explorer, and AutoRuns. Go ahead, they are all free. While you are at it, go ahead and check out his blog too. It is good reading!

Using ZoomIT has drastically improved my ability to get my audience focused on my content in real-time webcasting sessions. ZoomIT is always turned on ready to be utilized. Now, if you have the money you can get a mouse pad so that you can draw figures using a pen instead of your mouse. That increases your ability further to draw free-hand figures on a white/black screen if asked to explain a complex subject. I find it extremely useful to have this ability. It is almost as being in front of the audience scribbling down notes on a whiteboard.

The ZoomIT application runs in your background and adds a new icon to your taskbar. You can set your own favorite shortcut keys to activate the features. The shortcut keys are defaulted to CTRL+1, CTRL+2, and CTRL+3. If you have activated ZoomIT via one of the shortcut keys, you disable it by pressing the [ESC] key. It is very simple!

Here is a summary of what you can do with the application as it runs in the background

• Draw on the screen with colors like Red, Blue, Green, Orange, Yellow
• Change thickness of your drawing pen dynamically
• Erase your drawings by pressing ‘E’
• Invoke Black or White screen (useful for doing ad-hoc drawings)
• Invoke a Break screen with countdown timer to let audience know when break is over
• Zoom In/Out screen
• Use [ESC] to get out of the drawing mode quickly

Here is a screen capture of ZoomIT

Download the software from Microsoft here.

…Esbjorn…

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