Live Room

 

Last Minute Checklist

When opening the presenter link for the live room, the system will need to perform a simple audio and video test to check your computer’s bandwidth and syncing. Take note of the last minute checklist (shown below) as each of these are important for a successful webinar.

 

Test Your Video and Audio

Click Continue and you will be informed of the webcam/microphone tests (shown below). As it says, you’ll be able to turn them ON/OFF at any time once you are in the webinar room.

 

Click Start The Test to begin. You will see drop down menus for selecting your webcam, microphone, and a live video stream (shown below) . If the screen shows your webcam and you can hear sound (make sure your computer is not muted), go ahead and click ‘yes’. If you do not see or hear yourself, click no and the system will attempt again.

If you cannot seem to get it working, click the camera icon in the URL bar. The drop down menu will show you whether the camera and microphone are blocked, or if the wrong camera or microphone are being used. Reload the page if you have changed any of these settings.

 

Enter the Room

When you enter the room (shown below), your camera and microphone will be off by default. The option to turn these on are at the top of the page alongside the screensharing feature, and whiteboard tool (pointed out below). You can find these same options in the center of the window on your video screen.

In the upper left is a highlighted star indicating that you are an administrator for the webinar. If you have co-presenters, their windows will also have this star, but it will be greyed out. You can click it, turning it yellow, to give them administrator abilities (such as ending the webinar or adding more admins).

Virtual Background & Blur

The very next button (marked below) allows you to blur or replace the background of your webcam.

Use one of our preset backgrounds, or select “My uploads” (shown below) to choose your own up to 4 megabytes.

Go Live and Panic Button

Next to these buttons are the Go Live (marked 1 below) and Panic Buttons (marked 2 below). If you’re having trouble connecting or something has gone wrong, you can use the Panic Button to create a new webinar room that all attendees will be moved into. This button should be reserved for emergencies only.

 

Sidebar

Let’s take a look at the sidebar. At the top, you can find information about the webinar room itself. Whether you are live on air, how many people are currently in the room, how long you have been broadcasting, and how strong a signal you have for broadcasting. 

Below this, you have all your options and settings for your stream. There are a lot of features and they have all been separated into tabs you can find on the left. The first that is open shows the room settings. 

Here you can disable or enable chat, change whether chat messages are public, private, or allow both. 

You can disable showing the number of attendees to your attendees, as well as disable their ability to request to speak. 

You can also redirect all attendees to a URL of your choosing by entering a URL here and clicking the icon on the right.

Finally, if you are screensharing, showing a presentation, or using a video, you can choose where your webcam thumbnail is positioned. 

Attendees Speak

If you enable attendees ability to speak, you will find their requests in the bottom tab (shown below, labelled “Speak”) where you can accept or deny the request. If you accept, they will be brought in as presenters with video! 

 

 

Chat

The next tab is where most of your interaction will happen: Chat. You can not only chat with your attendees (or have a moderator chat with them) but you can also create sticky messages to remain on screen for them to see. 

When chatting, you can also choose to only chat with administrators or with the whole room so you can send important messages to each other without the attendees seeing them.

Finally, you can change the chat mode into Q&A mode and attendee messages will be marked as questions while your messages will be Answers. You can change any message by clicking the bubble next to a message.

Polls

In the third section, you can poll your audience. If you used the Full Configuration during setup, you will have the option to select a poll you created ahead of time, but if you used Express to setup your webinar, you can create a new poll on the fly! After the poll is over, you can opt to show the results to your audience as well.

Offers

Similarly, the fourth tab allows you to offer a product or simply link somewhere. While you can pre-configure these in Full Configuration, you can also create these on the fly, even adding images to the offers! 

Video

WebinarJam also allows you to share videos with your audience directly, without the need to share a video on your screen. Here you can add a video from YouTube or a direct link to an mp4 video file. Keep in mind that links like Wistia and Dropbox will not work for this feature. Using this feature for video sharing means that the video will be adjusted for each attendee’s bandwidth and it won’t rely on your own bandwidth for video quality!

File Sharing

File sharing lets you upload small files to share with your audience directly! Perhaps you have an audio file for your attendees to listen to later, or maybe a compressed folder of resources. This is the feature for sharing those things with the audience! You can configure it ahead of time, but you can still use it on the fly! 

Slide Presentations

Another awesome feature is Slide Presentations. You can upload a Keynote, Powerpoint, or pdf presentation to the system directly and control the slides from within the webinar room itself! No need to screenshare your presentation program window. 

Additional Presenters

At the bottom of the sidebar, you can invite additional presenters by clicking the plus icon, and entering their name and email. They will be emailed their own link to enter the webinar as a presenter (since your link will not work for them). 

Minimize Sidebar

Finally, you can minimize the sidebar by clicking the red tab on the side. When you are ready to go live, press the green button at the top and confirm Yes. WebinarJam will prepare for live streaming and go live while the button will change to red. When you are done, click it again, confirm yes, and the broadcast will end. 

Room Expiration

If you have not yet gone live, a timer (shown below) will be in the lower portion of the frame showing how long you have to go live. If you do not go live in one hour, you will need to visit the live room link again to reinitiate the room.