Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Zoom Zooming in Summer Camp: Helpful Hints and Strategies for Zoom (169)

I have been using Zoom this week, a lot. Our elementary summer camp has been engaging and exciting not only because of the preparation and design, but also because we have been using Zoom. It has been working great. Today I showed videos and set some backgrounds. Played around with some other features a bit.

Now that I am more comfortable I have been playing around with some cool features. There are plenty of new things to try.

Today students created movable hand models using straws, yarn and card stock, they dissected owl pellets, the tested various flying/floating objects (balloons, spinning straws with wings and a paper flying apparatus) for their different lift properties and the piece de resistance: they looked at real x-ray's and designed casts or slings to help the broken bones heal. 







Again, having the supplies packaged and picked up ahead of time, made this go smoothly and kept the students hands-on and interactive. Two more days left and I am excited to interact more with my students and learn new things about Zoom. Things that I can incorporate in my distance learning classroom next year.

To keep things safe and secure there are a few things on my checklist. Making sure I have these all checked off each day, has helped me feel less in maintenance and monitoring mode and more in teacher mode. I had some lagging today, so making sure I was hard-wired into the Internet really helped.

Zoom is a great tool, after using it for a few days, I feel silly I was so intimidated by it before. But, these following reminders are necessary to help any chat with students a safe place to learn. 



*  Make sure the internet connection is stable and secure, avoid public Wi-Fi.
*  Protect the access to video class by adopting a unique strong password.
*  Use Per-Meeting ID instead of Personal Meeting ID.
*  Use “Waiting Room” to check-in everyone. Assign a co-host if you need help.
*  Lock your virtual classroom to prevent unwanted interruption.
*  Turn off the webcam when it’s not in use.
*  Keep your Zoom account private. 



More to come tomorrow and Friday.

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