Before the quarantine for COVID19, I had never heard of Zoom. At school meetings and for class remedial sessions with students, I used Adobe Connect. Since the quarantine started, I have been to both interesting Zoom meetings, and boring Zoom meetings. As I talked about in my previous post, a boring Zoom meetings consists of one person talking without stopping for 40 minutes about a topic nobody is really interested in. The boring Zoom meeting is where the speaker never stops to check if the listeners are understanding what he is saying. However, for an interesting Zoom meeting, just like for an interesting classroom or online classroom, you have the following characteristics:
1. The speaker speaks for just a short period of time maybe 10 minutes tops.
2. Then for the remaining 30 minutes, he engages the audience in a series of discussion/conversational sessions. The teacher/speaker/presenter/host introduces the Bloom's Taxonomy topic question and then the students respond.
3. The whole 40 minutes is a back and forth of students talking about the topic and learning to relate the topic to their lives.
4. The host could call upon a student to talk and then flash the large screen to that student so everybody sees that student front and center, and the student can relate that topic to his life.
5. Each student takes turns being the 'big' face on the computer screen and getting a chance to talk.
6. Just like in elementary school, you can have students name the next student for the next turn which is always fun. The more you involve students in the learning process, the more it is fun.
7. If a student is not talking, you can ask simple Bloom questions to get him/her to talk so he/she can gain confidence talking on Zoom.
8. Use different modalities during the class. You can present a presentation video, play music or you can have students present videos. You can have a show and tell with students bringing in an object related to the topic like a kind of 'show and tell'. As soon as you involve the students, the Zoom session becomes fun.
9. Once the Zoom session becomes an active back and forth and the students stay on topic, the 40 minute Zoom session goes very fast and before you know it, it is over. Now that is the sign of a great Zoom session!
You have to make it worth the students' time to be there in real time just like you would in a face to face classroom. In any synchronous teaching situation, you make it a learner centered classroom to get the students to participate and have fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment