The free version is limited to 40 min sessions, it’s $15-$20 a month for longer sessions (which is cheap for this kind of service).
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FYI the other day Zoom’s CEO announced that because of Covid-19 he’s made Zoom unlimited for now for K-12 students.
If your institution has Google apps, I would also recommend trying Google Meet. Doesn’t have all the Advanced features of Zoom (like breakouts), but it does have pretty good live closed captioning. I have a few students who are hard of hearing and find video conferencing more challenging than face to face in this regard. The live closed captioning on Google Meet was good enough to keep them in the loop (provided all participants spoke a little more carefully than they might otherwise).
Also, and this was a first, all 8 participants connected and were able to manage the audio/video without help from me although none had used the service before. Quality was good too even though none used headphones.
And something to chew on w/r/t zoom from your institution:
I walk away from reading this (rant) with some skepticism. The concerns about data capture may be fully valid. However, the only agenda that universities and faculty on the front lines have at this point is to find the most effective path to an immediate switch in technologies. Sometimes, that means making a choice between path A (i.e. Zoom) or nothing.
Bluntly: We faculty (and likely also university administrators) do not subscribe to inferences that we are using a crisis to push (neo-liberal) politics or to bypass (FERPA) security rules on student data. Otherwise also bluntly: Give us a commanding statement of help or keep your mouth shut. We will certainly explore what better options exist after we get past this round of the triage.
As to the thread: I have learned that I will have to use Zoom b/c that is what our university has established. From what I have tested, Zoom seems rather intuitive to use for someone with a modicum of skills in computer technologies.
Onward and upward to my first two classes “on-line” tomorrow.
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JJW
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that’s very cool. I do a lot of online teaching. Zoom is fabulous especially as it allows for breakout groups. “Flip the Classrom”… do your lectures as a screencast and have the Zoom session for exercises.
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FYI I just saw this interesting video about free collaborative whiteboard from Miro. Never used it myself, but it looks pretty cool.
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Zoom was great. Here are some insights:
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I preferred to have everyone enter the classroom with their video and audio OFF. The background din was distracting otherwise. Also, some of the students (seniors – gotta love 'em) decided that they would be jokesters in their first on-line session, which was also rather distracting.
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The advice to take the presentation in segments is well-stated. I did 20min with pauses for questions. I asked students to type their questions in chat so that I could prepare an answer in advance.
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I wanted to keep the projection separation from the administration. I used two monitors. I kept the Zoom administration in one and projected my notes in the other.
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I wanted to switch between lecture notes (in Curio) and interactive demos (e.g. Numbers or python or …). I set up Spaces with Curio running full screen with the lecture notes and the other apps running in non-full screen in the other Spaces. I toggled between Spaces with the control arrow keys.
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I wanted to use my iPad for sketching mock ups AND still keep the above second screen shared. Zoom can connect to an iPad for projection but, Zoom only allows to have one shared screen at a time. So, I set up AirServer to project my iPad screen on a third Space. Now, I can toggle from lecture notes to demos to iPad sketch ups just by toggling among Spaces.
Here are some things I need to improve upon:
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Set up poll questions BEFORE the class. The chat response in Zoom is good for quick-and-dirty interactive feedback. In some case, you may need to require a majority of students to give a response before you move to answer the question.
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Engage a resource other than Zoom for students to send you “non-transitory” questions or comments. Be it email or the LMS of your campus, you will want a way to keep track of those things that show up in the Zoom chat that you know you will forget otherwise.
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JJW
6 Likes
Take control just sent this out:
Glenn Fleishman generously volunteered his time to write Take Control of Working from Home Temporarily , which also features advice from numerous other Take Control authors and other people with extensive experience with remote work.
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I’m exploring Etherpad at the moment. It seems to meet all requirements.
It’s open source so costs are greatly reduced, if any, … though you might want to
make a donation.
I just have a problem with typing text on Etherpad: you type a word, press spacebar for the next word
and the cursor goes back to the start of the word just typed.
Anybody got experience of Etherpad or seen this curiosity elsewhere?
Many thanks to everyone for their input. My needs are less complicated than many of the contributors’. Online one to one teaching is where I’m starting. Skype and Google Docs (for non mac users) and Pages (for mac heads) satisfy all my requirements at zero costs.
A couple more recent articles you might find useful: