How to screen share during a video conference? [on hold]

I need to give a research seminar remotely over a video conference link between two locations, me in my office or classroom and them in a seminar room, involved. I need to be able to see and hear the remote participants while they need to be able to see both myself and a set of PDF slides. Everyone will be on university networks with relatively high bandwidths. Overall it seems like a pretty straight forward video conference set up. I have played around a little bit with both Skype and GoToMeeting and while they nominally meet my requirements they seem to have four downsides:

• The content of the slides is sometimes obscured by the inset boxes that show the video of the people


• The slides cannot be presented in "full screen" mode because then you cannot see who you are talking to


• Pointing at things on the slides is difficult at best


• The experience seems to be slightly detached in my opinion since the presenter is not really linked to the slides.

Potentially, I am using the wrong software, but my guess is I just do not know how to present in this way. Is there a good way of doing this type of video conference? I was thinking of just using a regular classroom and positioning the camera to capture the screen and myself. This is how we sometimes record our lectures. I would then position a monitor in the front row so I could see the remote participants. Is this a more/less reasonable approach? I am a little worried that things will get too small. Is it better to stick with the detached head approach?