Closing participation for specific slides can be useful if you need to explain a question before your audience votes, or for any other reason where you do not wish the participants to respond to a question at that moment.
If you want to close responses completely for all slides, you can disable participation instead.
How to disable participation
You can close and open participation for a specific slide from the Presentation View.
Go to the slide you want to disable participation for
Open the Presentation Menu in the lower left corner by hovering your cursor there
Click on Turn off responses
You can also use your keyboard shortcut by clicking "C" on your keyboard to quickly enable and disable participation.
Please Note: It is NOT possible to disable participation for Quiz slides or Q&A slides.
To let your audience respond again, simply follow the same process: go back into the Presentation Menu and click Turn on responses, or use the shortcut "C" on your keyboard to toggle between enabling and disabling responses while presenting in fullscreen.
Start a Countdown
You can also set a timer to start a countdown that closes participation:
Go to the slide you want to disable participation for
Open the Presentation menu in the lower left corner
Click on Start timer
Select the time
Wait until the countdown is done
Pro Tip: You can also use the hotkeys shown next to times above to start the countdown. By pressing them again on your keyboard you will add another minute/30 seconds/10 seconds to the countdown.