How to make Zoom teaching suck less
Here are some tips I learned doing remote teaching last semester. I am putting them out here hoping that they help some teachers and students. Many of these tips will also be useful for remote workers in meetings and presentations.
Start the class with initial chitchat
The students are stressed, and initial chitchat is the least bit we can do to help. By opening the Zoom meetings 10 minutes early, and making comments about the weather, or some recent news or trivia, I found that students were ready to chime in and socialize before class.
Making your pet a part of this will melt the students' hearts. For the occasions when I could convince Pasha to cooperate for a couple minutes, that was an absolute crowd pleaser. It made everyone start talking about their pets as well.
I think it would be useful to use props, like different costumes/hats or decors related to the day's lecture, but I didn't have any good ideas of how to do this.
Use informal yes/no polls frequently
To keep things interactive, open the participants pane. There you can see yes/no button counts. Ask students yes/no questions frequently and monitor the count of yes/no answers from the participants pane. There is a clear button to clear the votes before the next question.
Zoom should get its act together on this though. Every time I toggle the share screen, Zoom loses the participants and chat panes, and I have to open and position them again. Gah!!
Encourage the students use the chat liberally
Even when the students write to the chat for making a joke, that is good. That is not a waste of time, but a part of the learning experience. If a student is writing about a trouble they had about class/life, that is also good. That student needed to vent out. In such a situation, many other students provide support or at least commiserate.
My experience has been that the students have been very respectful in their use of the chat box. I actually found that student participation increased because students who would be shy to raise a hand and make a comment were able to comment in the chats. There has been an increase in the number of questions. The nice thing is that if I was lecturing, other students chimed in to answer the questions.
This is all possible if you invite the students to use the chat freely. Don't worry they will be responsible.
Use breakout rooms to divide the groups into small subgroups
As a participant in a Zoom meeting, if your image is on screen alongside the other participants, there is some semblance of interactivity and participation. For groups larger than 9, you can't have this. Participants might as well be watching a YouTube video. It will be very easy to get distracted.
So use breakout rooms frequently. Assign students discussion topics and divide them in to breakout rooms. Visit each breakout room to learn about how the subgroups are doing, and give feedback and unblock them if needed.
Use a tablet solution
You know what has been the most underrated and underappreciated teaching technology? The blackboard. I missed having a blackboard in every remote teaching lesson. Turns out the blackboard was the ultimate calm technology.
Using an iPad or a Tablet for drawing doesn't come close. It is not easy and natural to use them. They don't have enough space to put 2-3 concepts and refer to them and relate them together spatially.
But yeah, in the absence of a blackboard substitute a tablet solution will have to do.
I wasn't able to get iPad play well with Zoom. I stayed till 3am one night to get to bottom of this. It turns out much of this depends on the Zoom setup provided to you from the school university. So I got a $70 XP-pen tablet. Better than nothing. But it was a pain to use. Writing and drawing with it over pdf slides were always an exercise in self-control and patience. On the bright side, the students had good laughs over my mishaps in using the tablet.
Use a monitoring headphone
When lecturing on Zoom for a long time, it feels like I am speaking to the void. Since there is no feedback to my ears about my voice, over time I tend to speak louder and louder to get my voice across the void. This results in a sore throat and unnecessarily loud recordings.
But that was before I heard about using a monitor. Podcasters and radio people all use a monitoring headphone to get feedback on their voice, and gauge things. I found that it is very easy and cheap to replicate the monitor.
- On Mac, just brew install sox
- In the terminal type, sox --buffer 1024 -d -d
- Now you have feedback from your microphone to your ear. Turn down the volume on your laptop until the monitor playback from your mic is the correct level for you. This does not affect the output volume to the class.
Bluetooth headphones are bad for acting as a monitor as they have a large lag. So use a wired headphone as a monitor.
Look on the bright side
Be resourceful and try to make the best of it. This is not the ideal teaching setup, but it is possible to get the job done. Plus there have been several upsides to remote-teaching as well. It saved everyone commute time. Think about the cumulative time saved. Having the lecture recorded has provided some students the opportunity to review the material. It made
The winning attitude is not to complain but to be enterprising and look for ways to improve things.
About Zoom, I had written this earlier in September: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/09/zoom-zoom-zoom.html
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