Due to the surge of the COVID-19 omicron variant, the university announced plans to start the semester with in-person classes shifting to meeting remotely. This unplanned semester start may force you to rethink how you will approach teaching and learning during this disruption.
When classes start next week, many faculty will move to meeting with their classes remotely at the regularly assigned class time. One question related to teaching remotely that we have been asked is about using Zoom for class meetings. In particular, some faculty want to know if they can use their personal Zoom accounts for class meetings. While there is no university policy that says you cannot, we suggest you use your XULA Zoom account for several reasons.
If you create a meeting in your personal Zoom account and provide your students with the Zoom link they will be able to attend the class meeting. However, an advantage to setting up the Zoom class meetings inside your course is that this can force your students to login to the course for each class meeting. This is helpful in recording their attendance. To have attendance automatically recorded in Brightspace, students need to access course content from your course for that day. Any activity inside the course is acceptable for recording attendance. It could be a link they click on, submit an assignment, take a quiz, participate in a discussion, etc. Even just clicking on the "Content" menu link in your course will count for attendance.
You must activate your XULA Zoom account in order to use Zoom in Brightspace. Activation is a one-time action on your part.
We have a number of Zoom resources that you may find helpful:
Did you know you can view Zoom usage reports to see the participants who attended the meeting and the amount of time they spent in the meeting? Here’s a link to how-to that explains how to view your Zoom usage reports.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Many educators found Zoom to be an invaluable tool in being able to continue with teaching and learning this last year. By now, you have probably gotten used to hosting or participating in Zoom meetings. Did you know that the Zoom software is updated periodically to add new features? There are some new Zoom features that you can use in order to provide a more engaging online learning experience for your students. Read on for some new features that may be of interest to you.
NOTE: You must have an up-to-date version of the Zoom client software to test out these features. Here’s some information on how to update Zoom.
1) Share Screen to all Breakout Rooms
If you used breakout rooms before, you may have facilitated a breakout room activity where you wanted to share your screen in all the breakout rooms while the participants are in the breakout rooms. If so, your wish has come true! There is a new “Share to breakout rooms” option available in when you click on the Share Screen button when breakout rooms are open.
Screen Share to Breakout Rooms
Note: Sharing your screen will interrupt any screen shares that participants may have started in the breakout rooms.
2) Focus Mode
Focus Mode does just that – it helps keep participants focused in a Zoom meeting. This feature was designed with educators in mind. Focus Mode places meeting participants in a view where they are only able to see themselves, the host/co-hosts, and the content they are sharing. In this view, hosts and co-hosts can also choose to view participants in gallery view, enabling them to see all participants simultaneously. This feature can help instructors who facilitate and proctor exams on Zoom. Instructors can require students to be sharing their screens simultaneously while taking an exam, and then the host can review each student’s screen, without the students seeing each other’s screens.
Prompt to Start Focus Mode in Zoom meeting
In order to use Focus Mode in a Zoom meeting, you first must go to your settings in your xula.zoom.us account and turn on Focus Mode. More information can be found in this Focus Mode article on the Zoom support site.
3) Vanishing Pen
This new feature in the Annotation toolbar is available when screen sharing or using the Whiteboard. The vanishing pen allows hosts and participants to use a pen tool where the drawings slowly vanish. This is helpful if you want to draw attention to something temporarily. Instead of using the draw tool to make a mark and then using the eraser tool to remove the marking, you can use the Vanishing Pen and the marking will slowly disappear.
You select the Vanishing Pen by clicking on the Spotlight button in the Annotation toolbar, and then selecting Vanishing Pen.
Annotation Tools - Spotlight using Vanishing Pen
4) Share and Play Video Files Directly Into Meeting
This feature allows you to directly choose a video file from your computer to play through screen sharing. Instead of having to share your desktop and bring up the file, or share a specific video playback program, the video file will play directly in Zoom for all meeting participants to watch. This option is located in the Advanced tab of the Share Screen window.
5) Reactions - Full Emoji Suite and “Away” Coffee Cup
If you click on the Reactions button in Zoom, you’ll notice that you have a full array of emojis to choose from in order to express your emotions! When an emoji or icon is selected, it will appear in the corner of your video, as well as next to your name in the Participants window. Emoji reactions will disappear after 10 seconds, while raise hand and nonverbal feedback, such as Yes, No, Slow down, and Speed up will be persistent and must be manually removed by the participant or host. Additionally, you will also find the Coffee Cup icon, which will display an “away” status for you. The host and participants can use the Coffee Cup to indicate when they have stepped away from the meeting and then turn the Coffee Cup off when they return.
Zoom ReactionsZoom Coffee Cup ReactionZoom Emojis
6) Immersive View
Zoom Immersive View is a feature that places some or all meeting participants in one virtual background. It helps to simulate the feeling of an in-person meeting or classroom. The feature can accommodate up to 25 people. To enable Immersive View as the host, click the View icon in the upper right corner of a Zoom meeting, and then click “Immersive View.” You’ll be presented with several options for virtual immersive “rooms” for up to 25 participants.
Zoom's View menu with Immersive View highlightedExample of CAT+FD Team in an Immersive View
7) Mute and Video Off When Joining a Recorded/Live Streamed Meeting
When participants join a meeting that is currently being recorded or livestreamed, they will be notified, and their audio and video will automatically be turned off. This will allow them to fully opt into being recorded or not, without their face or voice accidentally being recorded if they do not consent to it.
8) Post-Meeting Survey
Hosts now have the ability to have Zoom prompt participants to take a survey after they leave a Zoom meeting, including through third-party survey tools. After participants leave a Zoom meeting, the survey will automatically load in their browser. Hosts can then review the survey results via the Reports feature in your xula.zoom.us account or through the third-party website.
Add a survey to Zoom meeting
To apply a post-meeting survey for a Zoom meeting, you first must go to your xula.zoom.us account settings and turn on Meeting Survey. Then, after scheduling a Zoom meeting, the Survey feature will be available at the bottom of the meeting confirmation page. For more information check out this Post meeting Survey and reporting page on the Zoom support site.
9) Live Transcription
Live speech-to-text transcription, when enabled by the host, allows participants the ability to turn on in order to view live generated subtitles of the meeting’s audio. Participants can click a button to request the live transcription to be turned on. The host is notified of this request and is presented with a button that allows them to enable the transcription immediately. These features are located in the Live Transcript button in a Zoom meeting. Enabling the Live Transcript will make your Zoom classes more accessible!
Closed Captioning SettingsEnable live transcription in Zoom meeting
Try out these new features and let us know what you think by leaving a comment on this blog post.
ICYMI, you may be interested in these Zoom related CAT FooD blog posts:
As all of you know, the disruption due to hurricane Ida is forcing you to rethink how you will continue with teaching and learning during this disruption. When classes resume next week, many faculty will move to meeting with their classes remotely at the regularly assigned class time.
One question related to teaching remotely that we have been asked is about using Zoom for class meetings. In particular, some faculty want to know if they can use their personal Zoom accounts for class meetings. While there is no university policy that says you cannot, we suggest you use your XULA Zoom account for several reasons.
If you create a meeting in your personal Zoom account and provide your students with the Zoom link they will be able to attend the class meeting. However, an advantage to setting up the Zoom class meetings inside your course is that this can force your students to login to the course for each class meeting. This is helpful in recording their attendance. To have attendance automatically recorded in Brightspace, students need to access course content from your course for that day. Any activity inside the course is acceptable for recording attendance. It could be a link they click on, submit an assignment, take a quiz, participate in a discussion, etc. Even just clicking on the "Content" menu link in your course will count for attendance.
You must activate your XULA Zoom account in order to use Zoom in Brightspace. Activation is a one-time action on your part.
We have a number of Zoom resources that you may find helpful:
Did you know you can view Zoom usage reports to see the participants who attended the meeting and the amount of time they spent in the meeting? Here’s a link to how-to that explains how to view your Zoom usage reports.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Many faculty are teaching remotely as a result of the pandemic. One topic related to teaching remotely that comes up often is student engagement during Zoom class meetings. Instructors who meet their students synchronously through Zoom want to know that the students are paying attention and are engaged during the class session. Some instructors feel that for student engagement in a synchronous class they should force the students to turn their cameras on during the class meetings. This article by Karen Costa, a Faculty Development Facilitator, explains why it is a really bad idea to force students to turn their cameras on from a trauma-awareness and equity perspective.
Are you looking for ideas for student engagement in Zoom sessions that do not require you to force your students to turn their cameras on? In an article posted on LinkedIn, Karen Costa provides some practical strategies that can help you to engage your students in a Zoom session. A few of her strategies are:
Encourage students to use non-verbal feedback including raise/lower virtual hand, answer yes/no to questions, speed up/slow down, and emoji reactions (clapping hands, thumbs up).
Ask informal questions throughout the session and encourage students to use the chat to engage with you and their peers.
Use formal and/or informal polls.
Embrace the pause. Pause during the class session to give students time to think and answer.
Invite students to share out via audio and or audio/video in addition to answering in the chat.
Teach students how to be on-camera in a Zoom session (e.g., lighting, background, virtual background, mute/unmute microphone).
Normalize the fear of being on-camera.
Try using breakout rooms.
Make the chat the heart of your session.
Set the tone for engagement from moment one.
If this has piqued your interest, you can read more about these strategies in Karen’s Making Shapes in Zoom article.
Also, we have Zoom how-to resources on our CAT FooD blog. You can find links for the Zoom how-to resources here:
The Zoom Video Conferencing software allows instructors to record classes and meetings to their local computer or to the Zoom Cloud Recording Storage. While some users may find recording to the Zoom Cloud Recording Storage to be easy and convenient, the Zoom Cloud Recording Storage was NOT meant to be a long term video storage solution.
Our Information Technology Center's current policy is to keep 2 - 3 semesters of archived Zoom cloud recordings in the system before the recordings are deleted. You may recall that earlier this month, ITC announced that Zoom cloud recordings that were recorded on or before December 31, 2019 would be deleted from the Zoom Cloud Recording Storage. Therefore, my suggestion for Zoom cloud recordings that you plan to use from semester-to-semester is that you download them and then upload the video recording to a video sharing service (like YouTube or Vimeo).
Everyone at Xavier has a YouTube account. Videos uploaded to your YouTube account will not be deleted. You can make your YouTube videos unlisted or private if you do not want people to be able to search the Internet and find your videos. You can embed or create a link to your YouTube videos in your Brightspace courses.
ICYMI, we have a site license for Camtasia. Camtasia is a tool for making videos by recording from your screen and camera. Camtasia can also be useful if you want to edit your downloaded video recordings. Read more about requesting a copy of Camtasia in Bart's You’ve Got Camtasia blog post.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Wow, we spend a lot of time on Zoom these days— for classes, office hours, workshops, committee meetings, and even happy hours! Zoom has been both a God-send and a time-suck. It is pretty user-friendly, and has allowed us in CAT+FD to keep offering events while also allowing me to stay in (better) touch with my siblings.
But after a long day of multiple Zoom meetings, I find myself worn out in a special way. My back hurts, my eyes are tired, and my ears are sore from my fancy Bluetooth headset. The Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab recently studied “Zoom fatigue” and found four roots causes. Spoiler alert: they include having extended up-close eye contact, seeing ourselves on video all day, being stuck in front of our computer cameras, and requiring an increased cognitive load.
Check out this article which includes some simple fixes for each root cause (for example, reduce the screen size for Zoom, hide your own video). The article also includes the 15-item Zoom Fatigue and Exhaustion Scale that you could take to identify how videoconferencing is affecting you.
Have any tips that have helped you combat Zoom fatigue? Please share them!
Sharing your screen in Zoom meetings is an essential skill. But do you know how to get the most out of screen sharing while presenting with Zoom? In this 7 Zoom Screen Share Tips Every User Should Know (video), Scott Friesen shows you his favorite tips and tricks from sharing videos to polling your participants. Get ready to become the master of sharing via Zoom meetings!
Also, we have Zoom how-to resources on our CAT FooD blog. You can find links for the Zoom how-to resources here:
Many faculty find themselves teaching remotely because of the pandemic. One topic related to remote teaching that comes up often is student engagement during Zoom class meetings. Instructors who meet their students synchronously through Zoom want to know that the students are paying attention and are engaged during the class session. Some instructors feel that for student engagement in a synchronous class they should force the students to turn their cameras on during the class meetings. This article by Karen Costa, a Faculty Development Facilitator, explains why it is a really bad idea to force students to turn their cameras on from a trauma-awareness and equity perspective.
Are you looking for ideas for student engagement in Zoom sessions that do not require you to force your students to turn their cameras on? In an article posted on LinkedIn, Karen Costa provides some practical strategies that can help you to engage your students in a Zoom session. A few of her strategies are:
Encourage students to use non-verbal feedback including raise/lower virtual hand, answer yes/no to questions, speed up/slow down, and emoji reactions (clapping hands, thumbs up).
Ask informal questions throughout the session and encourage students to use the chat to engage with you and their peers.
Use formal and/or informal polls.
Embrace the pause. Pause during the class session to give students time to think and answer.
Invite students to share out via audio and or audio/video in addition to answering in the chat.
Teach students how to be on-camera in a Zoom session (e.g., lighting, background, virtual background, mute/unmute microphone).
Normalize the fear of being on-camera.
Try using breakout rooms.
Make the chat the heart of your session.
Set the tone for engagement from moment one.
If this has piqued your interest, you can read more about these strategies in Karen’s Making Shapes in Zoom article.
Also, we have Zoom how-to resources on our CAT FooD blog. You can find links for the Zoom how-to resources here:
If you're like me, you spent a lot of time in the past week thinking about how you will hold your classes online, but not a lot of time thinking about how you will hold your office hours online. Office hours don't usually require much forethought. You show up and deal with whatever comes up.
But now we need to think about our office hours, in particular, how we will make ourselves available to our students during those times. There are a number of options for doing this, including Virtual Classroom and Google Hangouts. I've decided to use Zoom, since that's what I'm using for my synchronous class meetings. But instead of creating a new Zoom meeting for every office hour (which would make for a real mess every time I log into Zoom, even if I just did recurring meetings), I'm going to use my Personal Meeting Room in Zoom.
Personal Meeting Room
Zoom's Personal Meeting Room is a meeting you set up once (although you can change the settings whenever you want), but that you can start and stop whenever you want. This way, there's only one URL you need to provide your students. It's sort of like telling your student where your office is on the first day of class. Once they now where it is (theoretically) you never have to tell them again.
For the most part, setting up your Personal Meeting Room is the same as setting up any other meeting in Zoom, but you don't give it a special name or description, and you don't have to worry about any scheduling details. To change the settings, click on the Personal Meeting Room tab.
The tabs available when on the meetings page on the Xula.Zoom.Us site.The tabs available when on the meetings page on the Zoom page in Brightspace.
Branding
One of the nice options with the Personal Meeting Room is that you can change the Join URL to make it more personal. Whereas with regular meetings, you just use whatever 9-digit code the system generates for you, with your Personal Meeting Room, you can customize the link. This makes it easier to for students to remember (just like how they remember your office location). It also gives you the opportunity to do a little personal branding.
With Personal Meeting Rooms, you can customize the Join URL to make them easier to remember (and to do a little personal branding).The profile settings, and many others, are only accessible by logging into Xula.Zoom.Us.
However, you don't change it on the Edit This Meeting page. Instead, you need go into Profile, but you can only do this through the Xula.Zoom.Us web site. You can't access your profile settings by going in through Brightspace. When you log into Xula.Zoom.Us, you'll see the following menu on the left of the screen. Click on PROFILE, and you'll be able to change a number of details about your account, including the profile picture that will appear in a meeting when you have your video camera turned off. You can also connect your Zoom account to your Google calendar, and many other things from this page. What we're interested in here, though, is your ability to change your Personal Link. Click on Customize, and you can change what follows the the main part of the URL (https://xula.zoom.us/my/). Instead of a randomly generated string, I plugged in my name: jason.s.todd. Your customization can be between 5 and 40 characters, but it can only contain letters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and periods (".").
From the profile page of the Xula.Zoom.Us site, you can change a variety of settings that you can't access through Brightspace.
So now I can add this link — just one link — on my Brightspace course. I can start and stop this "meeting" whenever I want, so when it's time for an office hour, I just go into Zoom, click on Personal Meeting Room, and click Start Meeting. I should note that this new URL I've created is just an alias of my real PMR link, that string of random characters. Still, it's a handy way to make it easier for your students to get in touch with you.
Calendar Events
I've also created recurring events in Calendars for each of my courses in Brightspace noting my office hours and providing the link. I've done the same thing with our regular class meetings. This way, when the students look at the Upcoming Events or the Course Schedule on Brightspace, they'll see, in addition to their upcoming deadlines, reminders with links for my office hours. In addition, if the student has installed Brightspace's Pulse app on their smartphone, they will receive notifications about these events.
Using Calendar events and Due Dates in Brightspace provides students with clear reminders about what's coming up in your class. For new remote learners, this may have a significant impact on their ability to keep on schedule with your class.
