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 Here's a very quick tip to keep you up to date with the Tips of the Day, thanks to Diane Rackowski. She has set up a feature in this blog for you to "Follow" the blog though email. Look for the "Follow by Email" section at the bottom of the menus at the right of the screen:

Enter your email address in the box and click "Submit". That's it! Each time we post a new tip, you will receive an email telling you about it. 

Thanks also to Diane for the new look of the Tip page. She has also added a feature to search for a previous tip through entering a characteristic term:

In addition, we now have a way to search the Tips by categories:

All these features are available in the menu bar at the right side of the screen. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Please continue to post comments or questions we can address in future posts.

Introduction to Jamboard - Whiteboard Deluxe!

Jamboard is an interactive, collaborative whiteboard, which is available for free to the U of M community through the G Suite of apps.  To find it, click on the Google apps icon in the upper right corner of your U of M email, then scroll down to the bottom of the list of apps and click on the giant orange J!  

Jamboard makes it easy to create, share and collaborate on a whiteboard!  As with a Google Doc, 

• I can create a Jamboard and share it with others.  
• I can set others’ access to view or edit.  
• My collaborators and I can work on the same whiteboard asynchronously or synchronously. 
• I can link to the Jamboard from anywhere: on Canvas, in an email, or through the Zoom chat.
• I can save my work as a PDF or image for later use.
• The Jamboard persists and can be further edited at any time.
• I can pre-populate a Jamboard to use with a class, and if I want to use the same content with multiple sections. I can make multiple copies of the same Jamboard.

In Jamboard it is easy to use colors, shapes, images, sticky notes with text, and to reposition each item with a simple drag and drop.  Each Jamboard file can have multiple screens, or “frames,” which you can create in advance or on demand, and reorder at any time.  You may want to assign a different frame to each group; to review what each group created, simply click through each frame like a slide-show. 

Here are a few examples to help you visualize the possibilities:

1.  The instructor writes a question on the slide.  Each student writes a response on a sticky note and posts it on the board.  

2. A student or the instructor underlines parts of speech or vocabulary with colored markers.  

3. The instructor creates sticky notes with individual words. Then the instructor or student can drag and drop the sticky notes to build sentences with varying word order.

4. Jamboard also allows you to save the entire board as a PDF or to save individual frames as images.  These PDFs and images can be reposted on a Canvas site for review or to compare with what students are able to create at the end of a unit.

These examples are only a beginning.  To see how each of the tools in the menu bar works, watch this video tutorial.  Then, for more ideas, tips, and templates for teaching, see this article on the Ditch That Textbook website.  Finally, let us know how you decide to use this exciting new tool! 

Automating Breakout rooms in Zoom

 Keeping the class on schedule in a Zoom meeting is often a difficult task, especially when the class involves group activities conducted in breakout rooms. Initiating the breakout rooms takes time, students don’t always enter the room when prompted, and maintaining time limits can be complicated, with stragglers returning to the main meeting at different times.

You can automate some of the process, thereby saving time and keeping the class on schedule. 

Here’s how (note this example uses Zoom version 5.3):

To assign students randomly to breakout rooms:

Click the “Breakout Rooms” icon in the menu bar at the bottom of the Zoom window to call up the settings for the rooms:

In the settings window, select the number of rooms you need, select the radio button to “assign automatically” and the students will be evenly distributed among the rooms:

Click the “Create” button in this window to create the rooms. Do not “Open All Rooms” yet!

To automate the process of entering and exiting the rooms, click the Options button at the bottom left of the Breakout Rooms window (as of Version 5.3 this button looks like a cog): 

The window that pops up provides the method for automatically opening and closing the rooms:

Check “Automatically move all assigned participants into breakout rooms” (A). When you Open All Rooms, the students will automatically enter the breakout rooms. They don’t hesitate to join the rooms and can begin work at once.

You can set the number of minutes you want to keep the rooms open (B). This is useful if you have a short task and you let students know how long they have to complete the task. If you select the option to “Notify me…” you then have the option to override the automatic closing of the rooms. Leaving it unchecked initiates the closing process.

Participants in the breakout rooms will see a countdown timer indicating how much time is left to complete the task.

If you leave the “Countdown after closing breakout room” ( C) unchecked, the rooms will automatically close as soon as the time set in (B) above is up. It might be a good idea to give the students a few seconds to wrap up, so if you check the box (C ) you can determine how many seconds remain after the closing sequence is initiated before the room closes and the students are returned to the main meeting. 

The most automatic process would involve selecting A and B in this window, determining how many minutes the breakout session will last, and leaving C unselected. This process might help keep the class plan on track.

Use any shared window as a whiteboard in Zoom

Zoom has a built-in whiteboard which is exactly that: a blank white space for you or your students to write on using Zoom’s annotations bar. One nice use of this whiteboard is to assign individual students to write their own responses to exercises or items they have previously completed. Each student can create their own text box and enter their text. Or they can use the “draw” option to write their text by hand. 

We covered how an instructor might use the Annotation feature in an earlier post. Briefly, here’s how the students can access the annotation tools in Zoom.

When anyone shares their screen, you can access the annotations tool from the menu at the top of the Zoom screen.

Click the black button at the top center of the screen to call up a pulldown menu:

Select “Annotate”

Now you can select any of the tools to begin populating the whiteboard:

But what if you want students to mark up a text or to highlight images? The whiteboard in Zoom is only a blank canvas, similar to a whiteboard in the classroom. The good news is that you or your students can mark up any window you share in Zoom. The Annotation tools work whenever someone shares their screen or window. So you can share a picture, for example, and have students identify the objects in the picture:

 Or you can share a text (web page, Word document, PDF, Google Doc...) and ask students to identify specific aspects of the text by drawing or writing on the screen. 

Or you can share a document with a list options and ask students to indicate their preferences through the “Stamp” annotation tool -- a heart or a checkmark or a star -- and thereby gauge the preferences of the class as a kind of instant poll. 

And now you can also hover over any annotation to see who made it. 

There are certain limitations to using Annotations in Zoom: 

• You are limited to one screen that everyone can draw or write on
• Annotations do not work on Chromebooks, so if you or your students use Chromebooks, you won’t be able to use the Annotations feature.

Look to upcoming tips where we explore options to the Zoom whiteboard and Zoom Annotations.

Change "share computer audio" setting while sharing your screen

Here is another welcome update from Zoom available in the latest version, 5.2.2. As always you can play a video file from your computer, but by default, the audio was not transmitted cleanly. You can remedy that situation by checking the box at the bottom left of the “Share Screen” dialog box as you begin the sharing process. See our earlier blog post detailing the process.

But what if you are already sharing your screen and you want to show a video, but realize that you have not checked the box as you set up the shared screen? Previously, you had to stop sharing and begin the process over again. Now you no longer have to stop sharing, but can turn on this setting while you continue to share your screen. 

Here’s how:

While sharing your screen, 

1. Click the “... More” button at the right of the Zoom menu bar at the top of your screen. 
   
   
   
   
   
2. Select “Share computer sound.” 

Now the sound from your video will be transmitted cleanly to your meeting participants. 

The ability to turn on the audio function from within the shared interface will save you time and will provide a much smoother transition to displaying video within a Zoom session.

NOTE: By the way, Only select the second option “Optimize Screen Share for Video Clip” if you will show a video full screen, so that nothing else is visible on the screen. 

Thanks to Lauren Goodspeed and Brian Barnett, Dept of French and Italian, for pointing us to this tip.

Engage students during wait times in Zoom

Have you ever experienced that awkward moment in Zoom when students are slowly arriving in your meeting and no one is talking? Or when you try to engage students with pleasant chit chat before class and no one responds? One solution is to implement the “While We Wait” community building activity from OneHE.

Arrive to your Zoom meeting 5-10 minutes early and implement one of these strategies to deal with the dreaded Zoom dead time:

• Play music from one of the target language cultures you teach. As students enter, ask them to react to the music in the chat.
• Announce a “topic of the day” that students can see as they enter Zoom and engage them in conversation about the topic (e.g., what they’re streaming on Netflix, a game they love playing on their phone, a time management tip for online learning)
• Project a personal or course-related photo. Ask students to react to the photo and try to guess why you chose it to be the photo of the day.

Once you establish a “While we wait” rhythm, ask your students to take over by suggesting and sharing songs, topics, or photos to react to in the minutes before class begins. Not only will you help minimize awkward Zoom dead time, you’ll also create an increased sense of community among you and your students.

-- Kate Paesani

Welcome back - Take attendance in Zoom

With the beginning of the new academic year, the Language Center brings back the Tip of the Day blog. The plan is to continue to describe small, manageable chunks or tips that support online or remote learning environments. The primary focus will be the teaching and learning of languages, but these tips may be useful for more general audiences as well. We are aiming to publish three posts per week.

Our first tip of the fall semester is an elaboration on a previous one: Who attended my Zoom session? Access a list of participants. Luckily, the process of taking attendance at a Zoom meeting has not changed, so this entry is still relevant, and may be useful for those starting out the semester fresh and who need to manage student participation, especially for large classes.

One thing to be aware of, however, is that the list of participants is accessible only to the individual who scheduled the meeting. For instance, if you have a very large class, perhaps with a TA or an assistant, that person does not have direct access to the participant list in the “Reports” menu. Only the meeting originator has access to this report.

One way you might give your TA  access to the list of attendees:

1. follow all the steps in the blog post
2. export the file as described
3. email the downloaded file to the assistants OR
4. share it in a Google folder
5. the assistant can then open the file in Excel or Google Spreadsheets and track attendance

Please let us know what you would like us to explorer or elaborate on in this blog through comments to the posts. We look forward to a productive semester of collaboration.