Webinar – a Cool Tool for Teaching and Coaching

Wouldn’t it be fantastic to teach in many places at the same time? Or to have business meetings all over the globe without having to take a plane? Well – today that is possible!

I had been teaching traditionally for many years when I discovered Skype. Skype is an excellent tool if you want to teach or coach a person who is located far away from you. I have had great results since the sessions have been interactive and I have been able to send the presentations with the same tool while speaking. But Skype has a limit. You can only invite a few people to each session. In this way you might find yourself having to do multiple sessions when you could have managed to invite more people to the same one.

I find the webinar to be a much better tool. There are many ways to create a webinar.  You can have hundreds of participants to the same session or only a limited number. It is up to you. Furthermore, you can choose if you want the participants to talk or to chat during the lesson, and they can choose whether they want their chats to be visible only for you or for all the attendees. You can upload a presentation in the webinar session and also have a web cam on, which makes the whole moment more personal and interactive. As a presenter you can record the session and send the registration to all the participants afterwards. A great idea is also to use the recording to do marketing for yourself or your company. You can post the recording on your homepage or use it in newsletters to new prospects.

Working in this way will save costs and time. You won’t have to travel as much as before but you will be able to reach a lot of people in the whole world! You can gather students from many different countries in the same live session.  But remember to consider the different time zones! Plan the time of the day accordingly if you want to reach countries in different parts of the globe.

Personally, I have used webinars for different purposes; for presentations of my book, for coaching sessions and for meetings with clients. My book is in Swedish, but there are Swedes everywhere in the world and a lot of people have been able to attend my presentations. This has saved me travelling time. I have also been coaching people in the sales field with this tool and feel it is fantastic to reach so many people without having to move away from my chair. I have used webinars for work, showing reports in real time for customers located in different countries and discussing topics as in a real face-to-face meeting.

It is possible to upload different documents to be used during the session and a good way to ensure that you improve each session is to make the attendees fill in a short survey afterwards. You can use the survey to check the comprehension, gather feedback of the webinar or both.

Of course, the best way to teach is still face to face. Personal contact is fantastic! When being near a person you can see in their eyes if they have understood everything and an experienced teacher can easily feel if there are questions. But you could never reach as many students in one hour that you can do with a webinar. And you could definitely not be in many different places at the same time!

About Annika Widen

Annika is a Marketing Professional within the IT field. She is Swedish and lives in Rome but works mostly in Swedish and English. She is also a writer and has written a book in Swedish and has 6 blogs in Swedish, English and Italian.

 

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www.annikawiden.com

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