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Neither you nor your students want to sit through a 60-minute lecture session on Zoom. Your goal when teaching (or facilitating a meeting) via Zoom is to ensure your audience is continuously engaged and achieving the desired outcomes.
The following strategies can help you to make your Zoom class sessions and meetings more interactive and help you accomplish some of your face-to-face classroom teaching strategies in the online environment.
Chat as a Back-channel
Chat as a Back-channel
Back-channeling refers to having a synchronous conversation while something else is happening. For example, people sometimes live-tweet their reactions to a presidential debate as it is being broadcast. Using the chat tool as a back-channel can give students agency and encourage engagement by allowing more students to interact with the live activity, rather than just listening.
Some uses of back-channel:
Emulate live-tweeting of guest lectures as a way to collect questions, which you then answer at the end of the session. Elect 1 student to monitor the chat and curate questions as they come in.
Host a virtual fishbowl, in which a small group of students interact around solving a problem or discussing an issue. The other students react to their classmates' contributions via the chat back-channel.
During your lectures, encourage students to log questions as small groups and elect 1 student to bring them forward for group conversation.
Notes and Cautions:
Back-channel activities can be overwhelming for some students, and are thus an accessibility concern. Therefore, it is recommended you offer this type of interaction as an option for students who thrive on this level of stimulation, but do not require it from all students.
Back-channel can also be overwhelming for you to monitor while you're also trying to teach. Consider deputizing a student or TA to monitor the chat if you use this feature, to make it easier for you to focus on teaching.
You can download the full chat history at the end of class, if you want to keep this record.
If you are experiencing disruptions because of the chat, consider limiting chat to Host only. Learners will still be able to send you questions but they will no longer be able to chat with the whole group or send each other private messages.
Breakout Rooms
Breakout Rooms
You can use Zoom's breakout rooms to have students do group work. Not all of the features that are present in the main session will be present in breakout rooms. Still, as the instructor, you can "travel" from one breakout room to the next, broadcast messages to various rooms, and end the breakout sessions when it is time to regroup.
Before a meeting, breakout rooms may be created and pre-assigned for up to 200 participants in the meeting in the Zoom web client.
During a meeting, you may initiate breakout rooms in one of the following ways:
Manually sort students into pre-determined rooms
Automatically sort students into rooms by desired headcount for each room
Create breakout rooms and allow participants to select their own room (newly-added fall 2020).
Note: Consider deputizing a TA to help monitor breakout rooms by making them a co-host. Co-hosts will also have the ability to "travel" from one breakout room to the next once you have put them in a breakout room, but co-hosts cannot start or stop breakout rooms (only the host can start or stop breakout rooms).
For more information, visit Zoom's guide to getting starting with breakout rooms.
Whiteboard
Whiteboard
Draw on the whiteboard, or ask students to contribute to a whiteboard as a means of engaging them differently in the discussion. To access the whiteboard, select New Share from the host controls and the whiteboard option from that menu. Notice you can use text, draw, or stamp with shapes.
Note: whiteboard activity is completely inaccessible to people who use screen readers. If you use this feature, be prepared to read aloud all the contributions so that everyone can see and /or hear them. And, you'll need to take a screenshot of each whiteboard if you want to save it.
Screen Annotation
Screen Annotation
Zoom has basic annotation tools (text box, free form draw/pen, shapes, and highlighter) that you can use to guide students around a visual display (such as a website) or explain a concept. Access this when you are in screen sharing or presentation mode.
Note: screen annotations are not accessible for screen reader users. If you use this feature, be sure to use accessible presentation best practices: say exactly what you're doing while you're doing it, e.g., "I'm drawing a big red circle around the login button on this web page." Or in the case of the image below, I'm drawing a yellow circle and placing an arrow over the annotate button.
Zoom Polling
Zoom Polling
The polling feature for meetings allows you to create single choice or multiple choice polling questions for your meetings. You will be able to launch the poll during your meeting and gather the responses from your attendees. You also have the ability to download a report of polling after the meeting. Polls can also be conducted anonymously, if you do not wish to collect participant information with the poll results.
Interactive "polling" Tools
Interactive "polling" Tools
If you would like an even more dynamic experience, try using one of the many interactive polling and presentation tools out there. These tools allow you to either create activities from a webpage or download an add-in and create them directly in PowerPoint or Google Slides. You can even use these for low stakes quizzing! These are worth exploring considering some include more than 30 different question and activity types.
Here are just a few of the examples of polling tools available:
Note: None of these products are supported or endorsed or supported by the Online Consortium of Oklahoma. These are displayed for demonstration purposes only. Contact your institution's information technology support desk to inquire about supported polling tools on your campus.
Mentimeter offers multiple question types
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