From time to time, as part of a Table Topics session, we ask members to talk briefly about their experience with Club Awesome. We then pull out the best bits (and edit out all the ums and ahs) to create a couple of minutes of total video introducing prospective members to our club.
Highlights from Facebook Live @ Club Awesome Toastmasters, May 3, 2019
Here’s a peek at the learning, laughter and applause you can expect when you visit Club Awesome Toastmasters in Coral Springs. We broadcast live from our meeting on May 3, featuring an introduction of members, Table Topics impromptu speaking practice, and a featured speech on using online video in your marketing by Madalina Iordache of Bright Pink Agency.
This version of the replay has been edited to highlight the best moments from our meeting.
Here’s Madalina’s presentation as a separate video: Video Marketing for 2019 & Beyond
Let’s GO BIG on Facebook Live, May 3
We’ve done a few experiments with Facebook Live broadcasts from the club before, but on May 3 we’re going to GO BIG — that means trying to attract the biggest live audience, the most likes and shares, and lots of replay views of the video. Ultimately, we want that online activity to translate into new visitors to our club.
To make that happen, I’ve created a scheduled event that will go live Friday at 7 am from our Facebook page. The placeholder post for that event is here:
Please Like, Share, and also click the “Get Reminder” button to make it easier to tune in for the live event. Share it now and again later in the week. If you’re in the room on Friday, we’ll ask you to take a moment to pull out your phone and share the video feed with your friends. If you can’t join us in person Friday, you can still help us spread the word and make this a bigger event.
If you are uncomfortable being part of the live video for any reason, you can just watch — but I hope most of you will find this to be a fun way of sharing what we enjoy about this club with a wider audience. I’m promoting it as a way for people to get a glimpse of the learning, laughter and applause we share every Friday. Guests should be reassured that they are invited to participate but do not have to.
To maximize the opportunity, we will tweak our agenda slightly to make this “good TV”:
- Sgt. at Arms should recognize the Facebook Live audience during the meeting opening.
- Whoever does the invocation should be prepared to do it without reading off their phone or a piece of paper.
- As President, I will explain what we’re doing and why. Give a little spiel about the meaning and value of the club.
- For self introductions, members will be called up to the front of the room. We will not be doing introductions of roles separately, so if you have a role, explain it during this time. Try to do it in an entertaining way, if possible.
- Example: Good morning, Toastmasters of Club Awesome, welcome guests and whoever is watching on Facebook. My name is John Smith, and I love this club because of X, Y, and Z. Today, I am also the Ah Counter, which means I will be keeping track of what comes out of people’s mouths when they don’t know what to say.
- Toastmaster of the Day will be the last person to be introduced and will take over the meeting at that point. TOD gets to make their own speech about the great meeting they have organized, then we go straight to …
- Table Topics – keep it lively. Members who do not want to participate in TT via Facebook Live should let the topics master know in advance.
- Humorist – make it count.
- Speech by Madalina on video marketing.
- Toastmaster of the Day thanks everyone who participated and thanks the Facebook Live audience for joining.
- Broadcast ends. We have our 5-minute break.
- VPE Minute and any other business can wait until the end of the meeting.
This is an experiment, which I hope we can use as a worthwhile club marketing and recruiting tool. If it works, maybe we’ll try it again in a month or so. Meanwhile, let’s just try to have fun with it.
2019 Impromptu Speaking Contest Winners
Congratulations Deborah Pinnock, Bhagawati P Parmar, and Bruce Pockey for winning our club’s Table Topic impromptu speaking contest.
This contest tests the ability to respond to a question or prompt not of the speaker’s choosing. Contestants were led into the room one at a time and presented with a simple prompt: “To Be.” Here’s what they did with it.
Impromptu speaking is one of the most valuable skills we practice in Toastmasters, useful in countless real life situations where the ability to “think on your feet” is important.
Club Awesome’s weekly meetings almost always feature a more informal Table Topics contest.
Video Editing for Speakers: Create, Trim & Share
A lot of the editing you might want to do with the video of a speech is possible with free tools like Windows Photos / Windows Video Editor, Google Photos, or Apple’s iMovie.
I’m telling the story of how to do it in two videos, one of my speech about video editing at Club Awesome, and a second video that my friend Chris Guld of GeeksOnTour.com is allowing me to share for Toastmasters educational purposes. If you’re interested in digital photo editing and other topics of particular interest to travelers, I recommend that you subscribe to her complete library of video tutorials.
I frankly wasn’t aware that there was a video editor in Windows 10 until I saw Chris’s tutorial, but now that I know about it I plan to use it for a lot of simple speech editing tasks. Because I wanted to do some fancier editing of the recording of my own speech, splicing in images of the slides I used, I created the video below using a commercial tool, Camtasia. I probably also could have done it in Apple’s iMovie. Both of those allow you to edit multiple tracks of audio and video.
As you will see in the tutorial, the Windows video editor uses a simpler “storyboard” metaphor — but does a good job of allowing you to accomplish basic video trimming, cutting and splicing tasks. You can also add titles and even 3D effects.
More than promoting any one tool, I hope to communicate the basic principles and get you thinking about the possibilities.
First, here’s my speech video to set up the topic.
I shared the video below in the middle of that speech, so you’re getting the replay slightly out of order. This will make the “how to” of video editing a lot clearer.
Chris Guld’s tutorial isn’t specifically about editing a speech video — her example is a video of a dance party — but she does a great job of showing how to edit the timeline of a video to remove any unwanted bits at the beginning, at the end, or in the middle. That includes removing errors, like in her case the moment where someone walked in front of the camera while she was recording.
Chris discusses the video editor as a feature of Windows Photos, and I subsequently found another tutorial on the “hidden” video editor in Windows 10. If you have the current update to Windows 10, Microsoft added a “Video Editor” app — which appears to be just a shortcut for accessing the same tools in Windows Photos.
Another way you could use this tool is to combine clips from several videos — either the best moments or the bloopers — into a single video. Or you might use a clip from a video of a live speech as the introduction to a subject, followed by an explanation of the details produced using PowerPoint’s recording feature.
Now go forth, create, trim, and share!
Create Simple Videos with Nothing but PowerPoint
Did you know that you can create simple videos with nothing but PowerPoint?
The recording feature lets you advance through your slides while adding narration. Optionally, you can toggle on your webcam (your face will appear in the bottom corner of the image). You can then export from PowerPoint to a standard MP4 video file.
For many purposes where you want to deliver a message on video, powered by your voice and a few well-chosen images, this might be all you need to create something that’s sharable on YouTube or social media.
Or you can use this as a way of producing a video clip to be edited and combined with other clips into more elaborate productions.
Here’s a demo
How To (and How Not To) Use PowerPoint – Video and Notes
This is a presentation about how to use PowerPoint effectively and some common pitfalls to avoid. Some of this advice applies to other presentation technologies like Google Slides, but I’ll be sharing technical tips specific to PowerPoint.
We should start by understanding there are good reasons not to do a computer slideshow. Technology can fail you at the worst possible moment and often does. As a guest speaker, you may find that the projector doesn’t have the right plug to fit your computer. If your slides are important, make sure you’re clear on whether your host wants you to use your computer or theirs – and if they want you to use theirs, I would still bring my own laptop as a backup. Show up early and test everything so you know if you have a problem and have time to solve it.
On the other hand, Club Awesome members often come to me saying, “I just want to show a few pictures” or “just project this document on the screen and scroll down for me.” In those situations, you would make yourself look better by organizing the information in a PowerPoint deck and advancing through it with a handheld clicker.
A speaker should know how to use PowerPoint, but make sure you are using it to enhance your speech. If you don’t make it work for you, it’s likely to work against you.
Related: Create Simple Videos Using PowerPoint
One strong temptation is to use PowerPoint as a crutch, an electronic outline to remind yourself of what you want to say. If you’re reading your slides, what value are you adding for your audience beyond the message you could have delivered in an email. If you have complicated to information to share, create a handout. The handout can parallel the information you present live, but a printout of your slides is often the least effective handout you can provide. Design reading material to be read, but make your slides part of the experience you are delivering.
If you need to share web links — particularly long, complicated web addresses — put that in a follow up email or a blog post where people can click rather than click on the links rather than typing them. Sharing a very simple web address (or Twitter handle) on screen is different, if you can use that as a gateway to the richer information you want to share.
More on Resizing and Cropping Images
If my tips on resizing and cropping images go by too fast for you in the video, check out this blog post by the author of a book on PowerPoint.
The basic point I’d like to get across is the difference between resizing images which you do by clicking and dragging on the corners of the image and cropping images, which means you’re cutting away parts of the image that you don’t want to be displayed.
Resizing is the default when you click on an image, you can click and drag to reposition it. The resizing “handles” that look like little bubbles will be displayed at the corners of the image.
To resize images proportionally, put your mouse on the corner handles before you click and drag.
DANGER: Beware of stretching or squishing images, which can be easy to do if you drag the resizing handles from the top, bottom, or either side.
One way to switch to cropping mode is to right click on the image and choose Crop from the menu that pops up.
In cropping mode, the handles at the edge of the issue turn into square angles that you drag toward the center of the image from the top, bottom, left and right until you get the shape you want.
Menus and Toolbars
Although the programmers behind PowerPoint try to divine your intentions and helpfully present the right menus and options, sometimes you have to hunt for them.
Here are a few key menus to know your way around.
When you select a picture, you should see a “Picture Tools” menu under “Format” — but if it’s not immediately displayed, you may have to click on the Picture Tools menu that’s displayed over the word “Format.”
Notice that this Picture Tools button bar also includes a Crop option, with more options than were shown when I right clicked on an image. For example, “Crop to Shape” will let you crop an image to a star or an octagon, rather than a rectangle.
If your focus is on a text box or other on screen object, you may see “Drawing Tools” instead of “Picture Tools.”
In the video, I showed PowerPoint volunteering design ideas for formatting a picture. If you don’t want to wait for that to happen spontaneously you can click on the Design tab and pick Design Ideas to prompt the software to make some suggestions.
Other Resources
Using Images in Documents: 11 Dos and Don’ts
Better slide deck tips from the TED conference experts
http://blog.ted.com/10-tips-for-better-slide-decks/
From Seth Godin, a world class marketing expert, check out these tips on “How to fix your really bad PowerPoint.” One of his rules: no more than 6 words per slide. As in: kill those long lists of bullet points.
https://www.slideshare.net/slidecomet/fix-your-really-bad-powerpoint-slidecomet-based-on-an-ebook-by-sethgodin
Some more specific tips on designing a slideshow:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/easy-powerpoint-design-tricks-ht
Book: Presentation Zen
The ugly slide examples in my presentation are from a Vice article, The Pentagon Has the Worst PowerPoint Slides You’ve Ever Seen and the blog of a speech coach who in turn pointed me to the TED talks blog mentioned above.
Finding Images for Your Presentations
You may be violating copyright by using random images from the web, particularly if a court would find you were using them “for commercial purposes in your presentation.” A Toastmasters club presentation might not get you in trouble, but a keynote speech could. See:
Legally Using Images in Your Presentations from Copyright.com.
Safe sources:
Pixabay.com – royalty free images, often but not always fairly professional
iStockPhoto.com – professional images for sale
Creative Commons Search – find images shared with “some rights reserved” (for example, requiring attribution of the artist or photographer). Many images on services like Flickr are shared this way.
Video: Better Speaker Workshop
The opening ceremony and keynote by Godfrey McAllister
“So You Think You Can Compete?” Panel Discussion
Lois Margolin: Why You Should Compete in the Humorous Speech Contest
Devin Dickerson Humorous Speech
Daniel Prudhomme Evaluates Devin Dickerson
Bernard Campbell: Evaluations in the Real World
Dorrette Keen: Evaluations
Speaker: Fernando Lopez
Evaluator: Luiz Bravim
Dorrette Keen: Evaluations (Follow Up)
Video: Member Testimonials for Club Awesome
From our “Table Topics” impromptu speaking exercise on Aug. 24.
Register Now for the Broward TLI Training Event on July 28, 2018!
The Broward Toastmasters Leadership Institute (TLI) training event has been announced for Saturday, July 28, 2018 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Broward College (Davie).
Register in advance online for a discounted price of $10 at https://tinyurl.com/Broward-TLI. Otherwise, tickets can be purchased at the door for $15.
This event is for all Toastmasters and the most convenient location for members of Division B. Professional development topics include the Pathways program and technology assistance, club development, humorous speaking, and quality evaluation techniques, among others.
In addition, club officers should attend for training credit that counts towards your personal leadership awards and your club’s annual Distinguished Club Program (DCP) status.