Record Timed Oral Production in Zoom

In October we presented a process for allowing students to record their conversations in a Zoom breakout room. This process is an excellent way to record interpersonal communication, and we’ve used it for recording the interpersonal section of the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA).  When recording a conversation, we used randomly assigned breakout rooms with two people in each room.  

You can also record students individually in Zoom. This task might be similar to the simulated oral proficiency interview or to an individual chapter oral exam. 

The following procedure is a quick way to control an individual recording session, providing students with a specific task, determining how long they can think about their response, and determining how long they will have to complete the task.

To set up this activity, you will assign each student to their own breakout room and set a timer (in one-minute increments) to automatically close the breakout room, thereby limiting the time students have to complete the task.

For an overview of all the steps involved in this task, see the previous post.  Below are the instructions for setting up the breakout rooms with a timer.

Enable student recording in the participants list. You still need to enable recording for each individual student.

Set the parameters for the breakout room session:

• Open the breakout room control.
• Set basic parameters

1. Select as many rooms as there are students. This way each student is assigned to their own breakout room.
2. Select “Assign automatically” Each student is assigned their own room.
3. Click Create to assign the rooms

• Set the timing parameters

            Click the settings button at the bottom left of the breakout settings window (the cog icon).

            Select the appropriate settings as depicted below:

1. Checking  “Automatically move…” opens the rooms without asking students if they wish to enter. 
2. Checking “Auto close breakout rooms…” will limit the time they can spend in the breakout rooms. 
3. Enter the number of minutes you want them to speak. It appears this is possible only in 1-minute increments.

If you leave all the other boxes in this section unchecked, students will automatically enter the breakout rooms when you Open All Rooms. The rooms will automatically close at the end of the time you specify, and they will not have extra time after the rooms close.

At this point, you can present the specific task and give them an amount of time to think about how they might complete the task. Then, when you want them to start recording a response, click Open All Rooms. 

Sharing the task

There are several ways to present the task. The easiest way is to write out the task in the Chat. Because the chat persists, even in breakout rooms, students have access to the task while recording.

What if the task involves an image? Let’s say, you want your students to describe an image or narrate a story based on a set of images, or perhaps want them to compare two images. You can use the Chat for this as well. In the Chat window, click the File button and navigate to an image file that you want to share with the students. 

A link to the file appears in the chat, and students can download and open the image.

Another option would be to place the task and the image (or images) on a Google Doc or Google Slide. You can post the link to the document or slide in the chat. Students can access the document or slide by clicking on the link, and they will continue to have access to the elements of the task when in their individual breakout room. 

Further Tips

You can have more than one recording in a synchronous session. Ask the students to stop the recording after each task and to initiate recording again for each subsequent task.

You can ensure that each student is recording by observing the icon next to their name in the Participants list. Make sure the icon appears for each student before opening the breakout room, and make sure the icon does not appear when the task is complete.

One trick: if you have time in your session, ask the students to leave the Zoom meeting and to log on again right away. By closing the session, their recordings will be generated and saved on their computer. When they return, you can walk them through the process of locating and uploading the files to ensure that the recordings are all collected properly.

Where are recordings saved?

By default, Zoom creates a “Zoom” folder within the Documents folder of your computer. When recording to the computer, Zoom creates a sub-folder within this folder and places the recorded video of the meeting if you elect to record the meeting and save the video to your computer. This is also the folder where Zoom places a file containing the text of the meeting’s chat.

Open your Documents folder, locate and open the Zoom folder. The folder for each session is labeled with the date and time of the session  (e.g. 2021-04-12 08.44.31) and the name of the meeting. By default, Zoom saves both a video file (labeled "zoom_") and a separate audio file (labeled "audio_only_ ") for each recording. Should there be more than one recording per session, the label of each one contains a  sequential number. Students can upload each video file to a Canvas assignment for you to access. 

Although there are other options for recording students, such as FlipGrid and within Canvas, none include the option to limit the number of times students can record nor the amount of time they have to complete the task. This method encourages students to produce and record spontaneous speech to address specific tasks. Give it a try and add to the comments below to let us know how it goes.