Teaching on Zoom

A message I sent to my colleagues, after my first day teaching remotely....

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I hope those of you who taught today found that your classes went all right. I was very happy with mine, though I am lucky that we had a good vibe in class before now, and it is small enough (16 plus two TAs and a visitor) that it is not too hard to manage on Zoom.

In case anyone else did not know this (as I did not): Zoom has a 'raise your hand' feature. You will probably be unable to see it yourself, since the 'host' of a meeting can't raise their hand. But some of your students, at least, are likely to be familar with it, and you can invite them to explain it to the other students. I am told that it is on the Participants menu, which is accessible from a button at the bottom. When students do raise their hand, a little blue hand icon will appear on their window. Speaking of which, as leader, you almost certainly want to be in 'gallery view', so you can see everyonel rather than in 'speaker view'.

You may also find it helpful to keep the Participants window open. People who raise their hand will 'rise' to the top of that window, which makes it easier to keep track of them. (Unfortunately, you have to keep track of the order yourself.) You can also "Mute everyone" from this window, which you will want to do at the beginning of class, and whenever you start to talk for a more sustained period. Otherwise, the sum of the background noise can be distracting. Of course, students will need to unmute themselves to be able to speak. We had some humorous moments like that today, but everyone seemed to adjust easily enough.

Having two monitors available made a VERY big difference for me. I could devote one to Zoom and one to notes, a shared (with the course) Google Doc I was using as a whiteboard, and the paper we were discussing. If you don't have two monitors at home, you might think about grabbing one from your office. Even if you are using a laptop at home, you can almost certainly hook up a second monitor to it.