Pedagogy & Collaboration

Supporting Teaching and Learning

Zoom offers many useful tools to support teaching and learning such as screen sharing, recording features and a range of annotation tools. Screen sharing allows teachers to share digital material (including video and audio) with their students and recording lessons gives learners the opportunity to revisit the content at any time and at their own pace. The annotation tools allow teachers to really engage with their teaching and learning materials by drawing, writing and highlighting anything on the screen. This helps to make the learning both accessible and visually appealing.

Best Practices:

Get them interacting. The more your participants participate in a webinar, the more engaged they’ll be. Asking people to share their personal experiences, asking questions, taking polls, or showing a little bit of humor can help “break the ice” so your audience will jump in and stay involved.

Call for questions often. If a participant comes in with his or her One Big Question, but they have to wait 90 minutes for a Q&A session at the end, they’re spending that time thinking about their question, rather than the lesson. Or, as people have grown accustomed to these long webinars where they must hold their questions until the end, it’s easy for them to drift off or start doing other things—eating lunch, checking email, updating Facebook—instead of paying attention. However, if they know and expect the presenter to be calling on them for questions throughout, they’re more likely to pay attention to what’s being said.

Break up the class into digestible sections. It can be hard to follow along for an hour and a half and retain all the information. It’s helpful to break up your webinar into sections—about 10 to 15 minutes each—that focus on one concept or topic at a time. In addition to making it easier to follow along, breaking up the session lets you take time for a Q&A session or other interaction in between, giving your audience more opportunities to discuss the content or otherwise participate.

Prep the Technology

  • Start early to get everything prepared and work out any technical difficulties
    • Always have a backup plan in case of unexpected difficulties.
  • Make sure everyone can hear you.
    • Use a microphone when you speak.
    • Make sure the microphone is on and close enough to pick up your voice, no matter what location you are in.
    • Don't have side conversations.
  • Make sure everyone can see you (if cameras are being used).
    • Sit in good lighting.
    • Arrange yourself and the camera so you are fully visible.
    • Make eye contact with the camera.
    • In the group location, if you only have one camera, at least once turn the camera around the room (even if it's on a laptop) so everyone can be seen.
  • Don't be distracting.
    • If you aren't talking, mute or turn off your microphone.
    • Avoid noisy activities like typing when your microphone is on.
  • Shut off notifications on presenters computer

Pedagogy & Collaboration Tips:

  • Take advantage of the technology.
    • Guest speakers
    • Virtual field-trips
    • Sharing screens and annotations across multiple sites
    • Collaborative problem solving or Think, Pair, Share using breakout rooms.
    • Student presentations utilizing multimedia
  • Information Design
    • Visual and Verbal design is best
    • Simple is best -- not simplistic, but well thought-out, not too complex
    • Avoid cognitive overload -- lots of words keep students from focusing on what you’re saying because they are reading the text instead
    • Cute for the sake of cute is not effective -- have well-designed content
  • Presentation Tips
    • Highlight or change color of important keywords
    • Use guides at the bottom of the page to guide the readers
    • Use polling and audience response to gauge your presentation effectiveness, share diverse views, stimulate thinking. If you use polling, show the results so that your audience has a reason to look and not just listen
    • Use effective questioning techniques
      • Ask questions to prompt questions: How do you see yourself using what you learned?
      • Wait. Count to 10. Wait. Give people time to type or respond.
      • Use silence effectively. It’s not TV. You don’t have to fill every minute. Allow for wait time for attendees to read a slide.
    • Avoid using whiteboards in the classroom, as lighting will often cause glare, shadows and other problems. Use Zoom’s built-in whiteboard.
      • Share something on your screen and ask a student to annotate over it
  • Effective Handouts
    • Share on the screen something big and simple, easy to read, accessible.
    • Create handouts for info that can’t be presented big and simple, after the fact or in connection with the webinar.

Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning Theory

    • Developed by David Ausubel, psychologist
    • Main idea: Meaning is created through connecting language and mental contexts through two processes
      • 1. Reception -- which is employed in meaningful verbal learning, and
      • 2. Discovery -- involved in concept formation and problem solving.
    • A key underlying theme of this theory is Ausubel’s Subsumption Theory
      • Subsumption Theory - an individual’s existing cognitive structure is the basic factor influencing the learning and retention of meaningful new material
      • There are two types of subsumption.
        • 1. Correlative subsumption -- New material is an extension of what is already known
        • 2. Derivative subsumption -- New material or relationships are derived from existing knowledge structures
    • Application in webinars: Present information starting from the general and moving to specific, making sure to connect new ideas to familiar ones to help the learning organize new information.