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What's a webinar?

How to Participate in a Webinar
System requirements for your computer.

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A Webinar appears in a separate window on your computer desktop. The main webinar window shows the presenter's materials - a live image of the presenter's own computer screen. You can also maximize the window to get the best screen resolution. A smaller control panel for your webinar connection will appear at the top right on your computer. See larger image.

A "webinar" is a Web seminar. It's an online, real-time, interactive forum where individual participants can see materials the presenter is showing real-time on screen and hear the discussion. (A webinar is not just a presentation you read online by yourself.)

We use a webinar to provide our trainings for exactly those reasons: to let you "attend" a training regardless of your location but also so you can interact with the trainer, ask questions, take notes, etc., as if you were in the same room.

We use an ordinary (toll-free) conference call for the audio portion of our training webinars. A conference call allows you to listen and also ask questions. (The audio portion of a webinar could be transmitted over the Internet to your computer's speakers, but that's one-way and won't allow questions.)

Webinar technology also allows us to offer trainings to a virtually unlimited number of people, anywhere they are, without concern for classroom space. Using webinar, our trainings are never full and no one must wait until there's "space." We can train EPA staff at HQ, in Regions, and their contractors anywhere.

For some trainings, webinar allows participants to also follow along and try techniques at their own desk using their own software, if they want. An example of this is the training on using the revised EPA template. Most people successfully take the template training by just observing; but it is possible to try the techniques hands-on with Dreamweaver (although this may require some juggling of the different windows on your computer).

It's easy! You don't need any pre-training to attend a webinar. Just follow the instructions in your registration email. We'll walk you through by phone how to log onto the webinar if you still need help. If you've never done a webinar before, the computer will probably need to download a small piece of software, but that's it.

Read a comment we received about participating in a Webinar.

If you require help regarding webinar accessibility, please contact us.

System Requirements:

You need both a computer to see the presentation, and a phone to hear the dicsussion. Chances are, your office set-up is already adequate (or better) for a webinar. You can probably do a webinar from home, a hotel, or anywhere else.

You'll need:

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