We’ve all had them - I call them “crickets classes”. And even the best class section sometimes has an off day. Chat can help wake things up.
Here are some techniques for doing that:
Warm up a class ahead of time. You can get your class going even before it officially starts by posting a question to the chat during a “soft start” (i.e. that period between when you open the Zoom and the official start time of the class meeting) and repeating it every so often in the chat as people join the Zoom. Encourage people to post either to the class as a whole or to one another, privately. (It doesn’t matter if they stay “on task” for this during the soft start - you’re just giving them a pretext to start connecting with each other and it totally doesn’t matter what they’re connecting about. The point is to get them to bring some good energy into the class instead of having the pre-class time be full of awkward silence.)
Shake things up during class. You can liven up a sleepy class by encouraging everyone to post something to the chat. It can be something related to the class material or something completely random (“What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?” or “Which celebrity should just delete their social media accounts because they’re so lame?”) just to shake things up.
See who’s really there. You can periodically check to see if students have “ghosted” you (i.e. logged in, turned off their camera and audio, and then stopped paying attention) by posting questions to the chat that students are required to answer immediately.
Track participation. If your grading system incentivizes participation, chat can be really helpful in ensuring that your evaluation of students’ participation is objective. You can keep track of who’s participating in the chat much more easily than you can accurately keep track of participation in a fully in-person discussion. Simply save the chat when your class is finished (see below) and record in your gradebook who joined in the chat and how often. It’s a good idea to let students know ahead of time - ideally in your syllabus - that you will be doing this.
Here’s how you can save a Zoom chat:
During a Zoom session, you can save the chat by opening up the chat window and then, next to the word “file” on the lower right, clicking the icon with the three dots. When the menu opens, choose “Save chat”.
This will save your chat to your local computer. The default save location is your Documents folder/Zoom/Folder with meeting name, date, and time.
If you want to save the chat for every Zoom session you have with your students without having to think about it, you can set it to save automatically. Here’s how:
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)”.
Adjust the little slider next to “Auto-Saving Chats” so that it’s blue (on).
Depending on the content covered during your classes, you may want to prevent your students from saving the chat. If you want to turn this feature off, you must disable it in your account settings. Here’s how:
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)”.
Below the “Chat” slider, check the box next to “Prevent participants from saving chat”.
Disabling students’ ability to save the chat will also disable your own ability to save it or auto-save it. It will even make it impossible for you to select, copy, and paste it manually from the chat window. However, even if you and your students are prevented from saving the chat as text, it can still be saved by taking a screenshot.