First of all, let me say that teaching/learning over the Internet has a number of limitations - one of the greatest of which is the Internet itself.
So, when I read about Zoom, I thought that most of my Christmasses had come at once! It is clearly targetting large corporations with a need for professional-quality remote meeting capabilities. It runs on a wide range of platforms including: Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, IOS, Android, Blackberry, Zoom Rooms and H323/SIP room systems and offers the best quality audio/video signal processing that I have yet seen in any FREE software. Installation is a simple one-time process after downloading a very small install utility - once installed, a user simply clicks on a Zoom link to access the meeting they need. If you are the host and have not yet started a meeting by the appointed time, Zoom handily sends you reminder to get on with it! And, if you are frustrated with those packages that just drop one or all of your connections when bandwidth is compromised, forcing you and/or your meeting attendees to log in anew, you will be delighted with the resilience that Zoom shows - no, it's not magic, but it usually manages speedy and seamless reconnections when required. Sharing an application screen is a simple toggling exercise which allows you to choose from all of your open program windows and video AND audio sharing is enabled - yes, I CAN show movies for my students. Sharing a whiteboard is another very handy feature - and in text mode, I can copy and paste a specific passage from a text for editting by me OR THE STUDENTS! It is just a single click to grant control to a student if you want them to work on the whiteboard (or any other shared screen). I like to see my students throughout the lesson (stops 'em from playing video games or falling asleep when we get to the difficult bits!) and Zoom offers a range of display formats, including a rather neat "speaker focus" feature - whoever is speaking instantly goes full-screen. Even in "gallery" mode, the current speaker window is highlighted. There is a chat window which is simple to toggle between "Group" and "Specific User" mode for private comments. Another really valuable (for a teacher) feature is Cloud/MP4 recording of each and every session - not just the AV, but text from the chat window and audio stream only. Time-stamped and carrying the meeting booking title for easy reference. Zoom allows you schedule recurring meetings and links to several calendars, automatically creating meeting appointments AND (in Google Calendar, at least) even emailing invitations and meeting changes to listed participants. OK - I have been waxing eloquent about the benefits of Zoom - so, what's NOT to like? Just a couple of things that I would like the development team to take a look at: As far as I can tell, the only way to integrate file transfer is to have an independent chat active with each user - and not all of my users want to have ANOTHER "chat box" running - it would be wonderful if one could initiate a file transfer from the chat box in the meeting - of course, I would like to be able to choose whether or not to transmit to all attendees or to choose a private chat as my target. When scheduling a recurring meeting, it would be good to be able to set an end date for the series. Increasing the time limit for multi-user sessions in the free version to 65 minutes (currently 40) would be GREAT, but I understand the commercial reasons for not doing so. and schedule my multi-user meetings as 30 minute back-to-back sessions - time for a quick "comfort stop" between halves! For me, it would be a great benefit if the Zoom folk could sit down with the TenCent folk and hammer out their disagreement (whatever it is) - QQ email addresses automatically reject (505 error) emails authored from Zoom. And that's about "it" for my nit-picking - all in all, there are far more reasons to use Zoom than any other solution that I have found. If you want to try Zoom for yourself, look here: https://zoom.us/download
0 Comments
|
AuthorTony is an experienced on-line English and Science teacher with an extensive background in IT support and training. Archives
December 2016
Categories |