1) You can install the free Teams app from your app store for smartphones, or go to www.Teams.com for computers, to download Teams for Windows OS, Chrome OS, Linux OS, and Mac OS for free. Next, use your mobile phone number or a Microsoft email address to create your Teams account.
2) When you've installed Teams on your phone or computer, in Teams go into "Settings" → "General", turn on "Automatically start Teams", "Launch Teams in the background", and "On close, keep Teams running" so we can ring you when we start.
3) Then join our main Teams group: "Morning Prayers and Readings" in the eastern U.S., or there may be other "Morning Prayers" Teams group in other parts of the U.S. or in other countries.
4) When you first go to our Teams group video sessions, be sure to allow Teams to access your device's camera and microphone: without this, Teams won't work properly! If you want to conserve Internet usage, you can turn off your camera during recording.
The moderator will start up the video call for our Teams group, so please turn off your mic to avoid feedback noise in the reccording, especially if you join the group after we begin recording. At the end of the sessions, we will stop the recording, then you may turn on your video and unmute your mic so we can visit with each other if you want to.
An advantage of using Teams is that anyone with the above group link can join the group *anytime* to watch the recorded sessions. Group members can also type chat messages in our "chat" area *anytime* and it's "persistent" – it stays around between video sessions, which lets us text-chat with our Morning Prayers group anytime. You can, of course, have private "chat" or voice and video calls with us or others: use their Teams name or send them an invitation if they don't have a Teams account yet.
At the end of each section in our Daily Prayers web page, you'll find the web links for the Saints of the Day and Scripture Readings: "new cal." for the "New Calendar" Daily Readings in English, or "old cal." for the "Old Calendar" in both English and Russian. These links work fine on a computer. But if you're using a smartphone, it might work better to install one of their free apps – both are available at those websites for Android and Apple smartphones.
We hope to see you soon in our "Morning Prayers & Readings"!
Bob & Cheryl Hosken
(You are free to right-click or press Ctrl-U (on a PC) on this web page. on https://agape-biblia.org/Morning-Prayers.htm and on https://agape-biblia.org/daily-prayers.htm, then copy the HTML source code and modify it or translate the English text into your language. All of the HTML programming and setup instructions are already done for you!)
This is using Teams' installed version on a PC or a Mac. (The web app, smartphone, and tablet apps do not have all the settings to create and manage a Teams group chat.) Connect your computer to your Internet router by cable, if possible, to give you the fastest signal. But if you use WiFi, be sure you have a strong WiFi signal, otherwise your video might be choppy or drop the call entirely.
1. Select "New Chat" in the upper-left corner, then select a new Chat Group (not a Meet or a Community!) using the icons on the left. You'll be the chat group leader and add members. Give it a name such as "Morning Prayers and Readings."
2. When you add members to your chat group, that name will appear in Teams's members' list of chats. Teams will generate your group's link similar to ours above. To add people who aren't in your email address book, select the group name you've just created, then select "Share link to join group" and Teams helps you send email messages to those people, or you can send your Teams link by another way, such as by text message or posting the link on social media.
3. Teams then opens a window to let you search for people in your address book to add to your group. When finished, select the "Done" button in that window. You can have up to 100 people in your group using the free version of Teams, but Teams will only ring them or send a notification message if you have 20 or fewer people in your group, so it's best to keep your Teams group to 20 or fewer members. If members go inactive, send them a private message asking if they want to continue; if not, delete them sp you can add new members.
4. Press Ctrl-U or right-click (on a PC) to view and make a copy of this file so you can modify our invitation message – the "Morning-Prayers.htm" file and this setup file – with your group's name and link, set the time for your local time, and send the invitation with your Teams link for your group in email messages or post it on social media.
1. Open Teams to your group on the moderator's computer at least 3 minutes before your announced start time and turn on the mic. If necessary, close all other apps and other browser tabs except for "Daily Prayers." (This will free up your computer's electronic memory [RAM], so your computer isn't slowed down by "paging" – writing unneeded content to the hard drive and then reading it back into memory: this will help your recording from becoming "choppy." It's because electronic memory that works at almost the speed of light is 1,000 times faster than the hard drive!)
2. In order to have a conversation, at least one other person must join the call, so just in case nobody else answers remotely, every day before start time, use a different smartphone, tablet, PC, or Chromebook to start Teams in someone else's Teams account on this other device: [Be sure that second device's Teams address is in your "Daily Prayers" chat group as a moderator, just in case you accidentally press "Leave" in your main moderator's account of your "Daily Prayers" Teams group so the 2nd device can re-add you.] Turn off Bluetooth and Teams audio to avoid feedback noise.
3. Now go back to the main moderator's device. Open the web page for reading the "Daily Prayers" now, 
so you won't need to do it when it's time to share that screen in Teams (see also step 7), like in this photo of our setup in our bedroom "recording studio." Notice that we have a piece of paper over our $20 lamp's bulb to soften the light shining on our faces. We bought this $33 external mic because the PC built-in mic's sound quality was poor in our recordings.
4. Open Teams to your "Morning Prayers" chat group on the moderator's computer, turn on the mic, send a chat to your group that you're starting the video session, and click the down-arrow next to the "Meet Now" button in the upper-left part of the screen to ring-ring-ring the group. (If you just click "Meet Now" it will only ring them once and they're more likely to miss the call.)
5. "Pin" your image to the screen. Turn on your video camera, and adjust the camera angle on the moderator's device to be sure things will look right on your other device and other people's screens,. During the recording, look directly at the main screen's camera, instead of looking away from the camera.
6. After Teams has rung all group members, on the moderator's device start the recording: we use the "Screenrec" app free version. Then press Alt-Tab to switch to the "Daily Prayers" web-page in your browser to read from the moderator's device, as long as your camera and mic in Teams continue to run. We share our "Daily Prayers" screen right from when we start on Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday so that people will be able to read the prayers with us: press Ctrl-plus to increase the font size to 150% so it's readable on members' smartphones, and remind them to hold their phones horizontally, in "landscape mode," to see the text larger.
(On Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, we let the viewers see us as we read the Morning Prayers from the first 4 pages in our "Morning and Evening Prayers" 28-page booklet. I have prepared a special version of the first 4 pages for podcasts with a prompt at the top: "(On Mon.-Wed.-Thu.-.Sat., cue up Saints & Scripture Readings, then read from here.) to remind you on which days you should cue up the "new cal." or "old cal." links located after Psalm 51 in the "Morning Prayers" section, to display the Saints & Scripture Readings on your "Daily Prayers" screen before you go online in Teams and start recording. This is optional, but it provides a bit of variation.
7. Welcome people to your group! If more guests join the group after you begin recording, remind them to turn off their microphones to avoid feedback while you're recording. Screenrec stores your recordings online – at least 30 days worth of 30-minute recordings. You can also download each daily session from Screenrec and upload to a video server such as Substack, YouTube, Vimeo, or share the link on your Google Drive, newsletter, blog, etc.
8. On the days that you read from the printed Morning and Evening Prayers, to share what you'll be reading from "Lives of the Saints and Scriptures" in the middle of a call, scroll down on our "Morning Prayers" web page just past Psalm 51 to the links for "new cal." and "old cal." before you start the call so you're at the right place when you share "Lives of the Saints, etc.! Next, click Teams's "Share" button and locate the correct browser tab, then switch to that window to see what you're sharing so that you can read it, scroll it, etc. To record a video with sound, be sure to press "Share computer sound" in Screenrec before you start the recording. Then press Alt-Tab to see that video's screen. Remind your guests to hold their smartphones horizontally (in landscape mode) so they can see the text larger, because the moderator's computer screen is always in landscape mode. When you're finished sharing, press Alt-Tab to return to Teams and press "Stop sharing."
9. When you're done with the prayers and Scripture readings, on the moderator's device, stop the recording, then ask your guests to turn on their mics so we can all visit with each other for a few minutes, "unpin" your video so you can see everyone's faces better, and when you're finished visiting, right-click the red hang-up button and select "End the call for all." But if others want to continue visiting, left-click the red hang-up button to end the call for yourself, and the video call will stay open until it's down to one person.
10. On your other device, turn back on Bluetooth and the volume. Click the "folder" icon in Screenrec to download the recording, copy the link for the recording, and post the link on your Teams "Morning Prayers" chat group so no-shows can watch it later.
It took us months of trial-and-error to refine this procedure, so "practice makes perfect." Let us know if it's unclear or you have any issues with it!