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Virtual club meetings, let’s share info

Joined
May 22, 2017
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Hi
As I’ve been posting elsewhere on the forums, our Lancaster Area Woodturners club has been holding morning coffee hour on Zoom to help our computer-shy members get on board and learn how this technology works. We’re having our first virtual club meeting next Tuesday, using Zoom.

it’d help us a lot to be in touch with other clubs that have decided to go virtual. It’d be great if AAW could collect this information and post it. We need to share best practices as we all learn what works and what doesn’t. And we need the encouragement and fellowship of knowing we aren't alone here, we’re in this together, we’ll make it through.

I’d be grateful for any responses posted here, and/or for private messages. And I’d be thrilled if AAW leadership would step up to the plate here and help us out. Right now we’re flying blind and alone.
 
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Joined
May 22, 2017
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I’ll have to applaud y’all’s efforts to develop remote demos and our club certainly would be interested in that, later. Right now, we wouldn’t know what to do with it. We’re preoccupied with the preliminaries: how do we remotely coach (and coax) dudes in their 70s and 80s, who did not grow up with computers, onto Zoom and into a virtual meeting room? What can we do, remotely, about their inadequate internet hookups? How can we help them find and use their own damn mute button? Once they are on line with us, what does a club meeting look like? We’re at the level of teaching our guys how to hold a piece they made beside their faces to show it, not in front, or in the lap where the camera can’t see. Before we will be able to entertain remote demos, we need to learn how to crawl. That’s the level of support and sharing I’m looking for.
 
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For someone that does not use a computer often, you need to provide a basic step by step process to select and open the application. Every computer and operating system is a little different so you need to address the small differences one computer at a time with a start-up procedure and step by step with precise descriptions as to each action to complete.
Some computers and operating systems are terribly slow in opening up and readying the applications to be used, novice user needs to be aware of this. The use of a mouse is different on a desk top computer and a typical laptop computer, these differences will also require precise descriptions in their proper use for a novice to understand. Your step by step procedure will also need to be at the extreme basic level, using the mouse to move the cursor to your desire application and double clicking the correct button on the mouse, this process is simple for a daily computer user, for a novice it needs to be spelled out precisely for each step taken.
 

Roger Wiegand

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We just did our first club meeting this afternoon (which went very well), last night I hosted a "virtual house concert" with a great banjo player from Detroit and an audience of friends that spanned the country on Zoom. I used to hate video conferencing in the 90's and 00's, but I'm very favorably impressed with Zoom. Not so much with Google Hangouts, which my museum team is using. We managed to get a significant number of OF's on without difficulty. In the days before Corona it would have been easy-- just ask each of your members to have a grandchild present for setup. My wife's book and knitting groups are meeting by Zoom and they are religiously technophobic, so there is hope for all. Zoom is pretty much "click this link then follow the instructions" so most folks who can operate a lathe can do it.
 
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Some things that lead to problems .
1. not all desktop computers have a webcam and some may not have a mic
2. unless you can get a screen share it is hard to tell what the computer on the other end is doing
3. different OS are sometime hard to figure out, Win 10 and IOS have buttons in different places, and then there is Android.

So to adequately answer all these problems you need to know all these systems. Once it is setup Which is easy to do when the link is used for the meeting the other problems can be worked on as can presentation of images. I think many officers underestimate the abilities of older members to get the technical stuff done and that leads to slowing the whole process of communicating with membership.

Have a little faith and take a step forward as that is the only direction we can go now anyway.
 
Joined
May 22, 2017
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Lancaster, PA
Thanks for the tips Gerald!

Our Lancaster club has been holding morning coffee hour every day for a week now, for the purpose of helping members get on Zoom and coaching them up to an enjoyable experience. We're over 80% of the roster now, all older dudes.

We also noticed that a number of members come back every morning, they just like the fellowship. So after this initial period we will go to a weekly coffee hour, with the choice of getting together more often if there's appetite. Also note that once they are up on Zoom, smaller groups can schedule sessions whenever they want, the club meeting host doesn't have to be involved in that..

Most of our members have been able to get onto Zoom one way or another, often with help from their spouse. A few have needed telephone coaching. Once we get them on we can work one-on-one to sort out the mic, nostril-cam, witness-protection face, et cetera. Abilities and equipment sure do vary widely.

It's actually been fun, and we're now ready to have a pretty good first virtual club meeting, on Tuesday evening.
 
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