3 Tips for Including Various Synchronous Sources
GENERAL TIPS
- Consider sharing your whole desktop at the start of a session. That way you don’t need to make any screen sharing changes as you switch between apps. Test for readability in the zoom recording. Alternately, choose Advanced / Portion of Screen to show multiple windows while still keeping some stuff out of view of the students.
- Pop out the participants and chat windows before you start so they will still be visible when you share windows
- Watch out for popup messages on other devices or your main screen invading your broadcast feed.
- You can see what your students are seeing if you have another machine set up to log in as a different participant, maybe using a different zoom id to avoid getting bumped off your primary device. (Sometimes Zoom won’t let you “be in two places at once” with the same id.)
- Some things may not show up in the recorded version of the meeting, like participant votes or poll results. Talk about what you are seeing in case it doesn’t get visually recorded.
- Set to automatically record every time in Zoom settings so you don’t forget. (You probably need to adjust the detailed settings with a browser login to zoom.us)
- Set record local in Zoom so you will have a local copy to edit in Camtasia without waiting for download. Record to a folder that isn’t automatically copied to the cloud or other devices to reduce bandwidth demands.
Voice over PowerPoint or Keynote
- Presenting slides on Zoom is very much like doing it in a lecture room. Just be sure students can see the important content on the slides in the recording.
Keynote via iPad: Keynote can be a problem, as it will take over the whole screen in presentation mode so you can’t see any of the Zoom controls, or tell if a hand has been raised. One way to beat this is to run your keynote presentation on your iPad, then share your iPad screen via Zoom. This also enables the laser pointer and the annotation tools of keynote on iPad, so it’s a win-win.
Single Window Applications
- Share the app window, or just navigate to it while sharing the entire desktop.
Multi-Window Arduino IDE or Similar Applications
- To share multiple windows, share the full desktop. Students often need to see all of the windows to understand, not just the one you are currently focussed on. It can be a difficult tradeoff between screen real estate and font size for readability while following multiple windows. It is especially important not to scroll code out of view! Run some tests to see what goes out to students.
- Several presenters (including Calynn Stumpf and Sean O’Brien) at CEEA 2021 recommended OBS https://obsproject.com/ to combine multiple sources and feed it into Zoom. I haven’t tried it yet… but it looks interesting
Handwritten Equations and Diagrams
- A lot of what we do on paper is hard to represent dynamically on a screen. Use paper when it is the right tool! Capture video with a phone or tablet on a shelf above your writing surface. Zoom in as needed. Consider an app like Clean Feed (iOS App Store) to provide a camera image without settings, shutter, etc. around the edges.
- In Zoom use e.g. share iPhone/iPad via Cable to share just the phone or tablet screen, or better
- Run Quicktime File/New Movie Recording (or similar) to display the phone or tablet screen in a window that will show through your desktop share. (Note: Only works with one device at a time.) This allows a view from the device camera and application windows to be present simultaneously.