You’ll want to go into your account settings to enable this ability before using it with your students. Unlike whiteboard and annotation features, the ability to create breakout rooms are not enabled by default. My favorite of all the Zoom features for learning is the ability to create breakout rooms for your students. Having these tools enabled, you’ll be able write over any image, highlight certain features of a website, and make the viewing experience for your students much more interactive. You’ll want to check your account settings to make sure these features are enabled by default. Enable the Annotation FeaturesĪnother feature that you could use when sharing slides, photos, or websites is the annotation tools. If you are not using Zoom, a tool like has a bevy of tools including a whiteboard if you share your screen with your students. (just be careful you have one of the devices muted to avoid echoes) Of course, as you get more comfortable with Zoom and student expectations, let your students also use the whiteboard feature to share their understanding. This works better for drawing especially if you have a nice stylus or Apple Pencil. A little tip – if you have tablet like an iPad, install the Zoom app and then join the meeting with your iPad as well. To use it, simply go to share your screen and choose “whiteboard”. This feature can take some getting used to, especially if you are using a mouse or trackpad. Of course, if you don’t want to share your screen you can always use the built-in whiteboard feature that comes with Zoom. There’s nothing more embarrassing than you students seeing your latest beach pic or maybe your bookmark for you favorite drink recipe. One bit of advice, check what items you have on your desktop and in your “favorites” bar of an internet browser before you share that with your students. If you have a slideshow that you’ve already created for use in your classroom, don’t recreate the wheel, just launch it on your share screen and use built in Zoom tools like ‘raise hand’ or the chat room to have a floating backchannel as you go through your slides. This can be something as simple as sharing a question of the day to an entire slide show. While you may be doing many of your chats with just video, don’t forget that you have the ability to share part or all of your screen with your students. I’m going to start out with one of the basics. Here are 25 strategies to engage students on your next Zoom meeting: 1. As you would with the physical classroom, I would strongly encourage teachers discuss norms when it comes to interacting over video chat with their students prior to any of these strategies. Also, kids (especially teenagers) can say and do that darnedest things, especially when being remotely hidden behind a screen. However, as many of these strategies can be used with any video platform or device, I only focused on Zoom-centric ideas on the first 5 strategies, the rest you can use on any platform. While there are a lot of video meeting solutions out there, I’m going to focus many of the tools around the Zoom platform as it has some of the best interactive features and seems to be the most widely accepted in K-12 schools across the country. The purpose of these tools is to draw students into the lesson/activity and make them engaged and looking forward to your next virtual class meeting. Some of these strategies take little set-up while others might take more time and energy to make them really successful. That said, in order to get our students to that deeper state of learning with greater depth of knowledge (DOK) levels, we need to make sure they are engaged when we have synchronous conversations and discussions. That kind of learning is generally better when done with a mix of asynchronous learning. These 25 strategies listed here are not meant to take the place of deeper learning. This can lead to a lack of student engagement and involvement in what is trying to be taught regardless of age. These can vary based on the ages of the students and the frequency of when a teacher interacts with their students, but most teachers realized quickly that they can’t use the same behavioral strategies (like proximity) that they use in a physical classroom. Some of the first things schools did when shifting to remote learning was to hold regular video meetings with their students. Now that we have all been thrust into the world of online learning, we have to figure out ways as educators to engage our students when they are online.
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