Current Events Give Us All a Chance to Try Distance Learning

With school buildings now closed to in-person instruction, all Oklahoma teachers will gain some experience in teaching students remotely. Although this may make some teachers uncomfortable, the goal is to just try some of the different teaching tools available. Here are some options:

Google Meet & Zoom

To connect with your students via video, you have two free options. If you are a G Suite for Education customer, you have the ability to use Google Meet, which allows up to 250 people in your video meeting. Google Meet is very basic but easy to use. 

Zoom is another option that provides a few more features. With the free version of Zoom, you can have up to 100 people in the call. Normally, the free calls have a limit of 40 minutes; however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools can have this limit waived. You simply have to use your school account as your login and fill out a request form (your district may have already taken this step).

One of the nice features Zoom offers that isn’t available with Meet is gallery view. With gallery view, the teacher and the students can view all other members of the video call at the same time. With Meet, the active speaker is displayed, and smaller pictures of other members are on the side in a scrolling window. Zoom also has this view as its default.

With both Zoom and Meet, you can record your meetings. This feature is built-in with Zoom. With Google Meet you can record the meetings if your Google administrator has activated this feature. Usually only available to enterprise education customers, Google has made it available to all G Suite customers until July 1st, 2020.  

Additionally, both Zoom and Meet allow you to mute participants. However, with Meet, only the students can unmute themselves. Zoom gives the teacher the ability to mute, unmute and prevent users from unmuting themselves to give the teacher more control, which is great for younger students.

Both Zoom and Meet allow you to share your screens. This will allow you to show any number of resources on the web or any software displaying on your screen. 

Jamboard

One program that can be useful is Google Jamboard. This is a whiteboard app provided with G Suite that allows you to have a whiteboard for your own use, or you can share the whiteboard with your students and allow them to access it on their own computers or tablets. There are two versions: first is the web version that you can run on any device that has a browser. There's also an iPadOS and Android app that you can use on tablets. The tablet version offers two features unavailable on the web version: you can display any document in your Google Drive (it brings it in as an image), and you can use a few stickers that are built into the app.

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Other resources

If you are not a G Suite for Education school, there are several other whiteboard options available. Educreations and Explain Everything are two. There are iPadOS and Android apps as well as web-based versions. Both of these products offer free versions, which provide basic whiteboard functions and paid versions, which are more robust. Finally, Microsoft has recently released Microsoft Whiteboard, and it works with personal or education accounts.

If you would like to learn more about Zoom, try it out or have any other general distance-learning questions addressed, OPSRC is currently providing “Office Hours” between 12 and 1 p.m. each weekday from March 23rd through April 3rd, 2020. To join, go to https://zoom.us/j/335065573.

If you have any questions about any of the products mentioned or any general questions about distance learning, contact me.