Engagement Activities with Zoom

Zoom Easy Engagement Activities with Zoom

Synchronous Activities

First: Consider This

What experience are you trying to create for the student?

  • What do you want the student to know and be able to do at the end of this activity? How does this align with your stated learning objectives?
  • What is an appropriate and logical way to provide the student with an opportunity to practice this? Have you communicated this clearly and added expectations and requirements?
  • In what ways can you add dynamic elements to the experience?
  • Are these synchronous activities regularly scheduled and posted somewhere students can easily access?

 

Zoom has

  1. A Canvas integration,
  2. HD quality video,
  3. Large participant capacity
    1. allows up to 300 simultaneous video participants in normal mode,
    2. allows up to to 50 breakout sessions
  4. Full-featured apps for iOS and Android, and has the ability to mix computers, mobile devices, and video conferencing rooms in one meeting
  5. Simple recording of sessions
  6. Full-featured collaborative whiteboards and screen sharing

Using Zoom, you can provide prompts for

  • Role-playing,
  • Behavior modeling,
  • Interviews,
  • Games,
  • Listening comprehension quizzes,
  • Synchronous discussions and debates,
  • Collaborative brainstorming sessions,
  • Student presentations,
  • Question and answer sessions,
  • Polls and surveys,

Student Presentations

You don't have to be the only one who instructs in your synchronous session. Share the wealth! Allow your students to take over the spotlight. This may be related to research and writing projects you have assigned, or you can simply have students sign up to cover topics of your choosing. This may allow students to provide a different perspective on the material you know all-to-well. 

Zoom will allow you to elevate a participant to a Co-Host, or you can simply allow a participant to share their screen and unmute their microphone.

Discussions and Debates

You can use your well-honed experience in guiding face-to-face discussions and debates within synchronous sessions as well. Just as within a physical classroom, you want to make sure to foster a sense of community while maintaining a safe learning environment. Keeping these two practices in mind, ask questions - probe for further details and challenge your students to fully engage in the conversation.

You will have to play the roles of referee and timekeeper. Keep the conversation on topic - interrupt when needed, redirect to allow other viewpoints to be heard, and have a plan (goals) and stick to it. All while maintaining a lively pace.

Polling

You can break up instruction, practice, group work, etc. by including regular participant responses via polling. You can do this in several different ways, such as have students use the 'raise hand' emoji to respond in the positive, allow your students to unmute their microphones to verbally respond, or by using the polling tool within Zoom.

Not only is this a good way to maintain engagement, but this is also a good way to determine how well your students are keeping up with the pace you're setting. Ask questions that will help students consider their understanding of the material.

Setting up Polling for Meetings

The polling feature for meetings allows you to create a single choice or multiple choice polling questions for your meetings. You will be able to launch the poll during your meeting and gather the responses from your students. You also have the ability to download a report of polling after the meeting. Polls can also be conducted anonymously if you do not wish to collect participant information with the poll results.

Before you begin

Make sure that you have enabled polling for your own meetings by:

  1. Signing into the Zoom Portal with your linkblue account
  2. Click on Settings in the left menu
  3. Navigate to the Polling option on the Meeting tab and toggle (shows blue) to enable.

 Creating a Poll

You can create a Poll in two ways:

  1. While setting up the meeting or editing an already scheduled meeting
    1. Go to the Meetings page and click on your scheduled meeting. If you do not have a scheduled meeting, schedule a meeting now.
    2. From the meeting management page, scroll to the bottom to find the Poll option. Click Add to begin creating the poll.
    3. Enter a title and your first question.
    4. (Optional) Check the box to make the poll anonymous, which will keep the student's polling information anonymous in the meeting and in the reports.
    5. Select whether you want the question to be a single choice(participants can only choose one answer) or a multiple-choice question (students can choose multiple answers).
    6. Type in the answers to your question and click Save at the bottom.
    7. If you would like to add a new question, click Add a Question to create a new question for that particular poll.
    8. You can add more polls by repeating Step b.
  2. You can also create a poll by clicking Polling during the meeting. This will open up your default web browser where you can add additional polls or questions.

Note: You can only create a max of 25 polls for a single meeting.

Check out the Polling for Meetings Links to an external site. Zoom knowledge base article for more information.