Speaker 1: When I first started giving presentations at work, I thought as long as my slides looked pretty and the content was important, people would give me their undivided attention, right? Not a freaking chance. I'm not gonna lie, and working professionals back me up here, it kinda sucks when you work so hard on a large team presentation, a presentation you know is very useful, only to have the audience look at their phones, work on something else, and maybe even turn off their webcam completely. So in this video, I'm gonna teach you how to cheat, how to use three interactive online tools to keep your audience's attention throughout the presentation against their will. Let's get started. Hi, friends, my name is Jeff, and welcome back to another episode of Think Outside the Box, where I show you creative ways to stand out at work. Like the Harry Potter series, your presentation should hook the audience's attention right at the beginning, keep them engaged throughout, and leave them wanting more at the end. And believe it or not, these three tools will help you get there. I like to start off my presentation strong by polling the attendees with a free online tool called Mentimeter. As a presenter, this is what I see in the backend. I can create slides with different question types, polls, quizzes, and content. Polls and quizzes are obviously for the audience to interact with, and content slides are static information you want to share. For my first slide, I have a multiple choice poll, asking them on a scale of Harry Potter how they're feeling today. And because I'm a very funny guy, this lightens up the mood immediately. You can also change the images, of course, in the content tab here, or you can just go with a very boring, feeling good, feeling bad. And there are advanced options down here as well. The second slide is a word cloud poll, where participants type in words in response to the question I've input here. What words come to mind when you think of digital marketing? I show you how the end result looks like in a little bit. And the third slide is a quick and easy quiz that allows me to get a sense of how knowledgeable the participants are regarding the topic I'm about to present on. Under the content tab, I can add up to six options, and I can check the correct answer by checking the box here. And the fourth slide, leaderboard, is automatically generated and it shows the results of the quiz. Some of you have probably already noticed the instructions up here, where you can go to www.menti.com and input this code to start interacting with these questions. Pro tip, you can also, in presentation mode, by pressing the present button here, you can click I, the hotkey I, to bring up a QR code for people to scan. If you're an audience member, simply use your phone or your laptop, go to menti.com, type in the code, and start playing. All right, I'm not gonna go through the entire thing. You get the gist. The free version of Mentimeter is a bit limited, but I think it's more than enough for most of us. I always try to include a variation of these three questions at the beginning of my presentations to hook the audience in and lighten the mood. The second tool is pretty powerful in keeping your audience engaged throughout the presentation, and this free tool is called Slido. That's probably not how it's pronounced, but it's what I'm going with. Have to use Slido. As a presenter, it's very easy to get started. Simply go to new Slido, from scratch, name it, big meeting, Tuesday start and end date, note down the event code, and click schedule Slido. And under the live polls tab here, you'll see a bunch of features, but I don't use any of these. I mainly use Slido for the audience Q&A function here. You can click present in a new tab, and here you can actually copy paste the QR code into your presentation, and you can even consider adding the QR code onto every single slide so that the audience can scan the QR code and input their question into the Slido queue whenever they want. And this is what the audience member sees after they scan the QR code or input the code into slido.com. They can ask a question anonymously if they want to, they can upvote other people's questions, and they can even withdraw their own questions if it has already been answered by the presenter. This Q&A workflow has two key benefits. One, a lot of professionals don't ask questions even if they want to because they're afraid of looking stupid. The anonymous option takes care of that issue. Second, it's smart to give attendees the option to add questions throughout the presentation so they don't interrupt you and they don't forget what they wanted to ask. On the backend, you can actually give a written reply if the question wasn't addressed in real time, you can star or highlight a question so that you can filter it for later, and of course you can mark as answered so the next most upvoted question gets pushed to the top. Pro tip, research has shown that on average, attention spans during presentations max out at 10 minutes. So you might want to review Slido Q&A questions every seven to eight minutes and or take advantage of the polling features here. These are similar to what Mentimeter has, but I personally just use Slido for the audience Q&A function. Last but not least, we have Kahoot. This tool has been around for quite a while now and I know they've added a bunch of new features, but I personally just use Kahoot as a quiz at the end of my presentations to test whether the audience has been paying attention. When you create a new Kahoot, click the settings button here to change the title and upload a cover image if you want. There are three question types, a multiple choice quiz, true or false, or a content static content slide. You can change the time limit of your question, how points are rewarded, and a single select versus multi-select answer option. After going through all that, you'll end up with something like this. I have five questions here. I have three multiple choice quizzes and two true or false. I recommend going through a practice round with yourself first to make sure there are no mistakes. To start the actual game, click start button here and you'll choose under player versus player classic mode and you'll be brought to this screen. By now, you can probably guess how this works. People log into Kahoot, they go to Kahoot, scan the QR code, input the game pin, input their name, and once everyone has joined, you as a presenter can start the game by clicking start. Pro tip, I always like to prepare a small prize and announce at the beginning of the presentation that we're gonna have a Kahoot competition at the end and the top three players get a reward. And no, it's not bribery if there's some sort of fair competition involved. Wait. Pro tip number two, in order to get a free account for Kahoot, you gotta put yourself down as an educator or student when you sign up and even then, you only get to have 20 players playing the game with you. It used to be completely free, but I guess they gotta make a living somehow, just like me. So give this video a thumbs up and subscribe. If you enjoyed this video, I highly recommend you check out my think outside the box playlist where I show you how to be more resourceful and scrappy in the workplace. See you on the next video. In the meantime, have a great one.