The mission of a Toastmasters Club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every member has the opportunity to develop communication and leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal growth. We have moved our meetings to the zoom so we can continue to deliver our mission on line, until it is practical to meet in person again. In the world we are now find ourselves in online communication is part of our daily lives and we want to ensure our members train and develop themselves so they can thrive when using this medium. The skills that our members are learning in this new format are useful for on-line and face to face communications.

To ensure our on-line meetings work smoothly we operate within the following etiquette guidelines:

Be Zoom Ready

Check your equipment works in advance. Zoom allows you test your setting before a meeting which can be helpful especially when checking your sound/camera settings, just go to zoom.us/test.

Be on Time

A zoom meeting is the same as face to face Toastmasters meetings. It’s stressful turning up late so make sure you log into the meeting 5 minutes early so you are ready to go at 7.30pm

Video

Part of the learning experience is to present to people so please keep your video on during the meeting. Please turn off your video if you need to use the bathroom or are interrupted during the meeting so it does not distract our speakers. We will have a short break during the session at which point you can choose to leave on/turn off the video function.

The Environment

Make sure you are aware of your surroundings when enabling your video as

people aren’t just seeing you, they’re also seeing whatever the camera is pointed at behind you. This is particularly important if you are speaking as you want people to be focusing on you and not what is happening behind you.

Video quality is improved with more lighting, just make sure the light is in front of you, not behind you – being backlit makes you harder to see.

You can experiment with presenting standing up as this keeps you dynamic and energetic. Top Tip- You can use and ironing board and position it at the right height for you if you want to present standing up.

The Camera.

If you’re presenting or speaking to the group, looking into the camera as this will give the appearance of eye contact, which is one of the elements of presenting well. It is also good

gauge reactions by looking at the screen, so alternating that with looking at the camera makes the audience feel like you’re really talking to them.

Mute

Background noise can be really distracting to speakers so if you are not speaking can you please remain on mute.

Screen share

Screen share is generally turned off for the meeting. If you need to share any documents as part of your talk please contact Ged Byrne

Name

Make sure we can see your name (first name followed by last name).

Roles

There are a number of roles at each Toastmaster meeting, which we rotate amongst our members. Each role take-taker can be identified by a set of initials which appear before there name. If you have a role can you please rename yourself so people are aware of your role:

President – P

Toastmaster – TM

Timekeeper – TK

Ah-Counter – AC

Grammarian- G

Table-Topics Master – TTM

Evaluator – E

General Evaluator – GE

Speaker – S

Chat Function

We use the chat function during meetings for voting, providing feedback and asking questions. Although this tool is useful please your limit this so we can focus on our speakers.  

Club committee members will remain on the end of the meeting so can answers then or in between meetings too.

By Anita Muir – Vice President Membership