You can have a great technical training topic, great examples, and a great instructor… and still lose people because they literally cannot see what is happening on the screen.
I’ve sat through plenty of webinars where the instructor says things like “go here,” “click this,” or “type this in,” and I’m sitting there thinking: where? What am I typing? Where am I even supposed to be looking?
This stuff matters a lot more than people think in technical training. If learners have to spend half their attention finding your cursor, reading tiny text, or figuring out which part of the screen you mean, they have less attention left for the thing you are actually trying to teach.
A simple rule: if learners cannot comfortably see what you are doing, the quality of the explanation almost does not matter yet.
Start by making everything bigger than feels necessary
Zoom the browser or application in. Increase the font size. Use Ctrl + mouse wheel or Ctrl + plus, whatever works in the application you are demonstrating.
And honestly, err on the side of making things too big. What looks comically large on your own monitor can look perfectly reasonable after screen sharing, compression, a projector, a small laptop screen, or somebody watching from a second monitor across the room.
If you really want to know what learners are seeing, join your own session from a smaller laptop and watch the screen share there. It can be a mildly humbling experience.
I usually avoid dark mode when teaching
I like dark mode just fine for my own work. I usually avoid it for live technical training.
Once you add screen sharing, compression, projectors, odd display settings, screenshots, and recordings, contrast can get unpredictable pretty quickly. A plain light interface is usually less exciting and easier to follow.
Make the mouse and text cursor impossible to miss
Windows has useful accessibility settings built in for this. You can make the mouse pointer larger, change its color, and turn on a colored text cursor indicator so learners can actually see where you are about to type.
Microsoft documents the relevant Windows mouse and text cursor accessibility settings here.
Sorry, Mac people. I know Windows much better. I’m an Excel guy.
Find My Mouse is weirdly good for teaching
I LOVE the Find My Mouse utility in Microsoft PowerToys.
It is ostensibly for people who cannot find their mouse pointer. Mine is already giant and brightly colored, so that part is not really my problem lol. But the spotlight effect is fantastic for teaching because I can quickly pull everyone’s attention to the exact part of the screen I am talking about.
ZoomIt is basically made for technical demos
If you really want to go big or go home, check out ZoomIt in PowerToys. Microsoft also maintains the standalone Sysinternals version.
You can zoom into part of the screen, draw, annotate, highlight things, and generally make a live demo much easier to follow. It is one of those tools that can look like overkill until you watch a good technical presenter use it well.
The boring details are part of the teaching
None of this is especially glamorous. But it is the kind of thing learners notice immediately when it is done badly.
Technical training is already cognitively demanding. People are trying to listen, watch, click, type, understand a new concept, and keep up with the instructor at the same time. Every small bit of visual friction makes that harder.
You should not need learners to work hard just to see what you are trying to teach them.
Technical training should be easy to follow
I build practical Excel, Copilot, Python and analytics training for teams that need people to follow along, understand what they are doing, and use it back at work.