#Maryland teacher aide zoom video professional#

A page on the learning management system shares every students' blog address. An introductory creative writing course where students maintain individual blogs in which they explore course texts and their own writing processes throughout the semester.Students communicated with me and one another on channels devoted to course topics and through direct messages.

#Maryland teacher aide zoom video professional#

A business and professional writing course taught entirely on Slack, providing students experience with a new-to-them workplace application.They collaborated to provide background, context, close readings, writing prompts based on the poem and more. An advanced poetry seminar where students work together during the scheduled course times each week, communicating on Google chat as they do, to create a website that features a deep dive into one significant American poem each week.

Here are some of the technologies I have experimented with in both synchronous and asynchronous courses. But in my writing courses, I task students with taking risks in their writing, so a course that presents students with new ways of learning suits the course’s goals. It feels like a risk to teach without Zoom - and students have also told me that learning that way feels like a risk. In Zoom, no matter what tips or tricks I try, my students are passive, and I leave sessions exhausted. Over the past two semesters, I’ve found that synchronous Zoom courses do not serve either my goals for the students or students’ goals for themselves. Faculty members are motivated to impart to students values like critical thinking and lifelong learning. And depending on your course goals, your students’ needs and your own needs as both a person and an educator, videoconferencing might not be the best-suited technology.Īt the rural, small liberal arts college where I teach a 4-4 load consisting of first-year writing, creative writing and other writing courses, students bring to their coursework motivation to build skills that will support them in future careers. Higher education instructors adapted their courses to Zoom midstream last March, and many of us remain dependent on Zoom or similar videoconferencing tools as we continue to adapt traditional learning models to accommodate social distancing, students in high-risk groups and temporary school closures and campuswide quarantines.īut you can support your students and their learning in other ways. Bruff, for example, has coined the term “intentional technology,” meaning “knowing what kinds of learning experiences you’re interested in creating for your students, then finding technologies that help support those experiences.”ĭuring the early stages of the pandemic, Zoom found us. This piece of wisdom is all the more relevant in exclusively online courses.

But they take for granted the need for videoconferencing in online college teaching.Ī higher ed teaching koan holds that we do not use technology for technology’s sake - see, for example, Michelle Miller, Flower Darby, Derek Bruff. Those perspectives and tips are valuable.

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Widely distributed strategies to combat Zoom fatigue among professors and their students include asking students to turn their cameras on or off, building in breaks, focusing on the Zoom meeting at hand, positioning your computer screen in a certain way and positioning your camera in a certain way. Joshua Kim has written prolifically and sagely in these pages about the use and overuse of Zoom in higher education contexts during the pandemic. It is disheartening to gaze into a sea of black boxes. It places low-income students at a disadvantage. The limitations of Zoom as a learning tool have been discussed at length. “I use Canvas Conferences instead!” he continued. I clicked on the Raise Hand button, not to state the obvious (that he was currently using Zoom), but to share my positive experiences teaching without videoconferencing tools. “I don’t use Zoom at all!” a colleague enthused during a Zoom meeting about teaching strategies during the pandemic.