Embedded Files
This may be the most pedagogically useful part of our training. Done well, remote conferencing can come close to the give-and-take that good in-person meetings provide. In the end, our goal remains Stephen North's famous dictum from his article "The Idea of a Writing Center": We make better writers, not better writing.
General Advice:
Zoom enables you to share any of your screens currently open. Chat enables you to share links. That's going to be useful if you provide live commentary to, say, a Google Doc.
You can also share e-mail addresses in Chat, for the somewhat more clumsy sharing of a file attachment. If a writer wants to share something in a format you don't have on your laptop, ask them to upload it to UR's Google Drive and share it that way, with permissions so you can leave comments.
Screen Sharing:
Easy to do...poorly. Keep in mind that you can share any open window, and you can edit content. Your writer can too, if you enable sharing for them (click name in Participants, then enable sharing in drop down). You may have to walk them through this process.
Here's an example of sharing your own screen and enabling others to do so.
Only the sharer can move the shared screen around. If you are going to work on a document together, I advise sharing in chat the address of a Google Doc you can both scroll through and mark in a browser window.
Your writers won't be able to share their screens until you okay it. To do so, see the image below. The "multiple participants" option is your key.
Using Chat Well:
This is one of Zoom's powerhouse features, if used well. I've published (before you were born! Gasp!) about the great benefits of synchronous text conferencing in classes, and now here it comes again.
It lets you keep a running tally of issues that might vanish in speech. You might even ask a writer to revise a sentence in the chat window, so they can copy/paste it into a Doc or e-mail.
Chat opens when you click the chat icon to the L of the Share-screen icon. It will appear below the participants. You can copy/paste to or from chat, even if you are not recording a meeting (we won't cover recording meetings here).
A Web address, such as to a Google Doc, will be "clickable" in chat. Your writer should have permissions set on the document so you can add commentary. If not, time and tech skills on their end may not permit it being changed, so your commentary will have to be oral or put into chat.
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