Q&A. While you’re presenting information to the class, or while student groups are presenting their work, people can post questions to the chat as they think of them for a really good Q&A at the end.
Ask comprehension questions. You can ask a comprehension question to make sure students understand the class material and tell them to post their answers in the chat (you can also do this via polls and clicker questions but often chat is much easier and you can do it spontaneously without any advance setup).
Take a poll or a vote. You can take a quick vote on something via the chat (you can do “nays only” to streamline things).
Defuse a tense situation. If you are having a difficult conversation and things get heated, you can ask everyone to take a few deep breaths then offer a prompt that will take students out of their limbic systems and back into their cerebral cortices. Ask them to post their answer to the chat. (While they’re writing, you get to collect your wits.) From here, you can have students pair up to discuss what’s in the chat, respond thoughtfully to one other person’s comment, see if they can identify trends or basic lines of argument - whatever you think will make the discussion thoughtful and productive again.
Don’t forget - you don’t have to manage the chat on your own! In fact, it’s usually not a good idea because it’s hard to keep your train of thought going while trying to manage both the audio/visual/in-person conversation and the chat. It’s easy to designate a student to manage the chat for you and it’s empowering to the students to have a role in classroom management.
One of the things that’s great about using chat in these ways is that it levels the playing field between students who are in-person and remote and it can be a great work-around when the tech isn’t cooperating - everyone has equal access to the chat and everyone can “hear” what everyone else is saying in the chat. People don’t have to try to shout through their masks!
To utilize these techniques effectively, you’ll want to adjust the chat settings so that students can only chat with the people you want them to chat with. Here’s how:
There are four different settings for Zoom chat. If you’re the host of a meeting, you can allow participants to chat with
“No one” (i.e. only you can post things in the chat - no one else can respond)
“Host only” (i.e. students can write private messages to you)
“Everyone publicly” (i.e. you and the students can all send messages to everyone on the call) “Everyone publicly and privately” (i.e. you and your students can send a message to everyone or to any one person at any time)
During a Zoom session, you can adjust these settings by opening up the chat window and then, next to the word “file” on the lower right, clicking the icon with the three dots to open up a menu with the four options listed above. Choose the option that you think will best facilitate the kind of class discussion you want to have.
You can change this setting at any time during a session to support different types of classroom discussion activities as you move through your material for the day.
If you want to adjust these chat settings more globally (i.e. for all the meetings you host), you can change them in the “Settings” in your Zoom account. Of course, you can still change these settings at any time - it’s just a few more steps.
Open up your Zoom account in a browser window.
From the left navigation menu, choose “Settings”.
Click the “Meeting” tab above the menu of security options.
Choose “In Meeting (Basic)”.
As you wish, adjust the sliders to on (blue) or off (gray) allowing participants to send everyone a message in the chat and/or to participate in a private chat. (For both of these settings, the default is “on”.)
Note that if you turn off a chat option here, it will no longer be available to you in the chat menu during a Zoom session - you will have to go back into your account settings and change it to restore that option for your sessions.
Note: depending on the content of your course, you might want to prevent students from saving class chats. Scroll down to learn how to do that.