So you want to learn how to do a presentation online, like a pro? You want to OWN your Google On Air presentations. Have you come to the right place. But first a quick story that includes two good guys and one bad guy.

When I first started teaching I quickly learned that if you were ever going to make fun of a student it had to be from a place of strength. You could make fun the smartest kid in the room’s intelligence, you could make fun of the best looking kid in the room’s looks (well be careful- you better know your audience and don’t do it in the first few weeks of school). So I’m going to use Jon Corippo as our bad guy. Now, just know that Jon is in my learning pantheon so I think the world of him, but on a warm Saturday morning in September of 2014 I discovered that Jon was making an easily fixable mistake in his online presentation. A mistake that TONs of people make. Here, I’ll show you.

Oh god, make it stop.

And he’s not alone. People all over the internet fumble around with the screen-share feature of Google Hangouts and Google On Air. People who are Google Pros. They pick the wrong screen-share button. They fumble with their words as they awkwardly click around setting it up: all while their audience patiently waits.

Now if you’ve seen Jon present live, he would never put up with this, but he probably just accepts the limits of the Google On Air software and makes the best of it. Well no more.

Here is how to not only fix that, but to make your presentation look as smooth as JR Ginex-Orinion‘s Buddha smooth head. (I love you brother, JR).

First:

You find two super smart guys. Let’s say…  Sean Ziebarth and anyone else.

Second:

You set up a computer with a laptop below it, like in the image above.

Third: 

You find an awesome silent partner to help you. I recommend Amy Brinkley.

Fourth: 

You have Amy set up the Google On Air ahead of time and call in to TWO Google+ accounts. THAT’S THE TRICK. Amy called my personal G+ and my school G+. She now has TWO windows on the bottom to click on. One window that just has our presentation and one window that has us talking to our audience. Now WE don’t have to do anything but present. Amy does all of the camera work. She just clicks back and forth from us to the presentation and then back again and WE don’t have to mess with the screen-share EVER.

Now we do have to do some clicking. You’ll notice my hand on the mouse is controlling the slide show so we know where we are in the presentation and Amy can click on the slide we are talking about to show the audience.

So how does it look? I’ll let you judge for yourself.

Now that video clip is from our CUE Online presentation: Google Isn’t A Question Company, It’s A Question Factory. This presentation was from the first ever all online CUE conference. If you want to watch the whole presentation or any of the more than 40 presentations you can visit the CUE site here. It’s only 10$ if you are a CUE member.

Now maybe you already have figured this out. Maybe you heard about it already. I mean we told Lucy Gray, Mike Lawrence, and Steve Hargadon what we were doing so maybe you heard it from them. I know we did this seven months ago, but I promised myself I would publish a post on this and now I can finally take it off of my mental check list.

However you discovered this simple trick, let’s fix this once and for all. Find your own Amy Brinkley and start presenting online like a PRO.

(We get none of the proceeds for that link or for presenting, but go ahead and check it out anyways, it’s way cheaper than the gas it takes to drive to a CUE conference.)