I wish it would have occurred to someone to call whiteboards “snowboards.” That sounds way more fun.

Zoom has had a rudimentary whiteboard as part of its Screenshare menu. For those of you who find that that whiteboard serves your purposes, keep using it.

For those of you have wished that the Zoom whiteboard had a little more functionality, check out the new Zoom whiteboards.

In your Zoom meeting room, you can find the new Whiteboards button in the bottom toolbar.

You can also access your whiteboards—and create new ones—by logging into the Zoom.us website. Have you created a whiteboard you want to use as a template? Click the 3-dot kabob icon on the whiteboard you want to duplicate, and select “Duplicate.”

After opening a whiteboard in your Zoom meeting, use the toolbar on the left to draw or type. Click the icon at the very bottom of this toolbar to add an additional 11 pages for a total of 12. From this same icon, you can delete pages or completely erase a page. Click the 3-dot kabob menu icon in the top right to export your whiteboard as an image file (png) or pdf. Want collaborators (co-owners, editors, commenters, or just viewers)? Click the blue Share button. Want to change the size of the webcam videos? Click and drag the horizontal bars on the webcam/whiteboard divider. (Speaking of webcams, do you like my ultra-serious thinking face?) To close the whiteboard, click on the bright red “Close Whiteboard” button at the top of the screen. It took me way too long to find it. I was looking for an X to click on.

Happy snowboarding!

Zoom released its latest update today, Monday, April 18, 2022. Below, I’ve listed some of the features that I find particularly useful. You can find the full list here. This update is a manual download. The easiest way to get it is to visit the Zoom download page and click the Download button. The installer will download to your computer’s download folder. Run the installer to get the updated version of Zoom.

Polls/Quizzes: New Central Library

For those who use polls/quizzes, you know that the questions you had for your personal meeting room were separate from the questions you had for your other meeting rooms. Good news. When you log into your Zoom.us account, you can create poll/quizzes that will be accessible from either type of Zoom room. As of this writing, only 10 questions can be stored in this central library.

Breakout Rooms: View Activity

For those who use breakout rooms, you can now get a sense of how much is happening in those rooms. In this screenshot, we can see who has their mic and webcams on. When someone is speaking, as the second person is in the screenshot below, the dark bar of their mic bounces up and down.

Here, you can see me screensharing in a breakout room.

This Zoom update was also supposed to show emojis. In our testing, no emojis appeared next to the participant names.

To turn on this feature, log into Zoom.us. Click on Settings, then “In Meeting (Advanced).” Under “Breakout room,” check the box next to “Allow host to view activity statuses…” While you are here, check the box above it, too, if you haven’t already: “Allow host to create, rename, and delete breakout rooms when rooms are open”—not because it’s needed for this feature, but because it’s a handy option to have. Click “Save.” (As I discovered in testing, if you don’t click the save button, the changes to your settings will not be saved. Who knew?)

Enhanced Meeting Reactions

When participants select a meeting reaction emoji, it will appear both in the top left corner of their video screen and at the bottom of their zoom screen. If a participant has turned off self-view (webcam is on, but they cannot see their video), they will still see their selected emoji at the bottom of their Zoom screen.

Chat Preview: Toggle On/Off

If you have the chat window turned off, chat messages will pop up on the bottom of your screen as a chat preview.

When presenting, the chat view can be pretty distracting. We can now quickly toggle it on/off by clicking the up arrow next to “Chat.” Clicking on “Show Chat Previews” will make both the checkmark and chat previews disappear. Click it again to make the previews reappear.

Gesture Recognition: Saving the Best for Last

When gesture recognition is turned on, Zoom will recognize your upraised palm as a hand raise. A little hand raise icon at the bottom of your screen will appear, and the outer circle will cycle from white to blue in about 4 seconds.

The hand raise emoji will appear just as if you had selected it from the emoji menu. You will also get the “lower hand” button at the bottom of the screen.

Participants who have their emoji hand-raise icons activated will have their videos pop to the top left corner of gallery view.

Even with the animal avatars, even though the palm (or hoof in this case) is not displayed, Zoom still detects the hand raise.

The other hand gesture Zoom recognizes (as of this Zoom update) is the thumbs up. There is no timer on the thumbs up gesture. The emoji appears as soon as Zoom detects the raised thumb. This also works with the animal avatars. Keep in mind that the meaning of the thumbs up sign varies by culture. In some locations—such as parts of the Middle East and West Africa—it’s equivalent to giving someone the middle finger. Since I know some of you were hoping for the middle finger gesture, you have my permission to use the thumbs-up gesture with either connotation.

Anyone who wants this kind of power, they need to turn it on. If you’d like your students to use this, they, too, need to turn it on. Run Zoom. Click on the up arrow next to “Stop Video,” and click on “Video Settings.”

In the Settings window, click on “General” (directly above “Video”). Scroll to the bottom. Right below the skin tone menu, click the box next to “Activate the following emojis based on hand gesture recognition ” (In our testing, even after the update, some users did not have this option. We are not sure why. Other users did not have the emoji package installed. On this settings page, they were given the option to install it. After installing the package and clicking the box, their hand gesture recognition was enabled.)

As of this writing, Zoom for computers and supported iPads have hand gesture recognition. Nothing yet for Android or iPhones.

I’ve written before about using Tampermonkey scripts for adding functionality to Canvas. If you’re not familiar with Tampermonkey scripts for Canvas, please read that post first. I have another one for my fellow intrepid Canvas users. This one comes from Ben Fisher of Crean Lutheran High School, known as fisher1 in the Canvas Community forums. Read his post here.

What the “Set Canvas Default Due Times” script does

Everywhere you can add a time for when an assignment, quiz, or discussion is due, you will have time buttons to choose from. Yes, you can decide what those times are. All of my course stuff is due at 11:59pm, so that will be the only button I have. However, I’ve edited the script to show you these three times as an example.

After clicking a time button, the calendar will appear with today’s date highlighted. Choose the date you want. The due date and time will be set. Click the Save button as you normally do. Done!

Get the script

If you have Tampermonkey installed, visit this website, and click the Install button. If you don’t yet have Tampermonkey, start with my initial blog post on using Tampermonkey with Canvas.

Editing the script

Let’s start by setting the times that will appear on the buttons.

Click on the Tampermonkey icon in your browser’s add-on toolbar.

Select Dashboard. From the list of scripts, select Canvas Default Due Times. (If this is the first script you’ve added, it will be the only one you see.)

In the script, look for the line that begins with “const defaultTimes” – this is the line that contains the code for the button times. Times are according to a 24-hour clock. Change the times to the ones you want. Be sure to keep the apostrophes and the commas exactly where they are. Change only the numbers.

In my courses, since everything is due at 11:59pm, this is what my line of code looks like. You do you.

There is one more thing we need to check on. [Ben Fisher, who wrote the code, amended the file to include the lines below, so need to add them. Thanks, Ben!]

Log into Canvas and look at the url in your browser’s address bar. If it starts with <institution name>.instructure.com, you’re good to go. Just click File and Save.

If your Canvas address starts with canvas.<institution name>.edu, then we have to do one more thing.

Take a look at lines 6 through 14. When you use a Tampermonkey script, the script needs to tell Tampermonkey which websites the script applies to. The asterisk (*) means that there can be any text there. We can see that the script will run at institutions that use <institution name>.instructure.com.

My college, though, uses this address: canvas.<institution name>.edu. The script doesn’t include that kind of address, so Tampermonkey won’t know to run, so we need to add some lines of code so that Tampermonkey runs on our Canvas pages.

Download this text file. Copy and paste the lines of code. You can either replace all of the existing instructure.com lines, or just add the canvas.*.edu lines after.

Click File and Save. Done!

Important note

Tampermonkey scripts are browser-dependent, meaning they only run in browsers where they are installed. If you use Canvas on multiple computers, you will need to install Tampermonkey and your Canvas scripts on all of those computers/browsers.

You can export all of your Tampermonkey scripts by going to the Tampermonkey Dashboard, clicking the box in the top left corner to select all, choosing Export from the dropdown menu, and clicking Start.

Very quickly, all of your scripts will appear in your downloads folder as a zip file.

Now go to the browser—on the same computer or a different computer—where you want to run the scripts. Install Tampermonkey there if you haven’t already. Click on the Tampermonkey icon in that browser. Select the Utilities tab. In the “Import from file” section, click choose file and select your downloaded zip file. Follow any online instructions. And… done!

Why do these webcam videos appear in this particular order?

[Source: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362323-Adjusting-your-video-layout-during-a-virtual-meeting]

The good folks at the MIT Teaching and Learning Lab have taken serious consideration of the algorithm Zoom uses to determine the order of webcams in Zoom’s gallery view (Rankin & MacDowell, n.d.).

1. The initial video placement is determined by order of arrival, with the most recent arrivals first. Those with their webcams on will be first; those with webcams off will be last.

    

2. Every time a person speaks, their video pops to the top left of the screen.

The MIT Teaching and Learning Lab staff ask us to consider these three questions.

• “If less vocal students only see a subset of more vocal students on their first screen, what message does this send about who is more or less valued in the class?”

We know that our more vocal students are more likely to be male (Lee & Mccabe, 2021; Wang, 2016) and white (Wang, 2016) and to have been raised in the middle or upper class (Markus & Conner, 2013).

• “If the students that speak most often are from a particular demographic…what unintended message might this send about who does or doesn’t belong in your classroom?”
• “How might Zoom’s algorithm impact the perceived composition of the class if students see one particular group being dominantly represented onscreen? For underrepresented students, this can exacerbate feelings of stereotype threat.” And I’d add, feelings of being an impostor (Jaremka et al., 2020).

Override Zoom’s gallery view algorithm

Rather than have the most vocal students appearing at the top of the screen, we can change Zoom’s settings so that everyone’s webcam videos do not move.

Open your Zoom room, click View in the top right corner, and choose Gallery. Click and drag one video screen to a different spot. For example, in the screenshot below, I clicked and dragged my video screen to the left. Click on View again, and now you’ll be able to click on “Follow Host’s Video Order.” Your meeting participants will see everyone in the exact same order you do—whatever order you put them in. All video feeds will now remain in these spots.

Strategies for increasing student participation

Making Zoom’s gallery view static is not going to stop your most vocal students from being the most vocal, but at least they won’t dominate the “front” of the classroom.

The MIT Teaching and Learning Lab article suggests four strategies for increasing student participation.

• “Providing ‘wait time’ before calling on a student to answer a question. This gives students the opportunity to formulate their responses before speaking”
• “Enforcing hand-raising.  This will help ensure that not only students who are comfortable jumping in have opportunities to provide comments”
• “Requiring multiple raised hands (e.g., Require that at least 3 students have raised their hands to respond before you will call on a student. This will allow you to call on students who are not the most frequent and/or fastest responders.)”
• “Calling randomly on students (e.g., Use index cards with students’ names and be explicit about what you are doing and why to bring more student voices into the classroom interactions. The random aspect of this strategy can help minimize students’ sense that any student is being ‘singled out,’ positively or negatively.”

These strategies came from a freely-available article they recommend: “Structure matters: Twenty-one teaching strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity” (Tanner, 2013).

References

Jaremka, L. M., Ackerman, J. M., Gawronski, B., Rule, N. O., Sweeny, K., Tropp, L. R., Metz, M. A., Molina, L., Ryan, W. S., & Vick, S. B. (2020). Common academic experiences no one talks about: Repeated rejection, impostor syndrome, and burnout. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 519–543. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619898848

Lee, J. J., & Mccabe, J. M. (2021). Who speaks and who listens: Revisiting the chilly climate in college classrooms. Gender & Society, 35(1), 32–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243220977141

Markus, H. R., & Conner, A. (2013). Culture clash: How to thrive in a multicultural world. Penguin.

Rankin, J., & MacDowell, R. (n.d.). How to overcome Zoom’s algorithmic bias. MIT Teaching and Learning Lab. Retrieved April 11, 2022, from https://tll.mit.edu/how-to-overcome-zooms-algorithmic-bias/

Tanner, K. D. (2013). Structure matters: Twenty-one teaching strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 12(3), 322–331. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-06-0115

Wang, S. (2016, November 3). Comfort speaking in class varies with gender, ethnicity. The Brown Daily Herald. https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2016/11/comfort-speaking-in-class-varies-with-gender-ethnicity

I have a colleague who emailed recently needing a transcript from a podcast episode. How could she get one? It’s surprisingly easy.

If you do not already have the file (mp3/m4a/wav—or mp4 if it’s a video), you’ll need to get it.

Step 1: Download the recording’s file

I use a Firefox browser add-on called Video DownloadHelper. For Chrome, try CocoCut. Visit the website that hosts the recording. The browser add-on icon will change when it detects a file it can download. The Video DownloadHelper and CocoCut icons will go from black and white to color. If the add-on doesn’t turn color, try playing the recording on the website. That will help the add-on see that there is an audio or video file it can download. Once the browser icon changes color, click the icon. The audio or video file will be downloaded to your computer. (Unless it’s YouTube. YouTube specifically blocks browser downloaders from working.)

If the downloaded file is something other than mp3, m4a, wav, or mp4, visit cloudconvert.com to convert the file to one of those formats.

Step 2: Get the transcription from Office 365 Word

Go to office.com, and log into your work or “premium” ($6.99/month) Office 365 account. With either kind of account, you get 300 minutes of transcription per month. If you’re doing a lot of transcription—say, up to 6,000 minutes each month—take a look at Otter.ai for $8.33/month.

Open a new document. On the Home ribbon, click the down arrow next to Dictate and select Transcribe.

A panel will slide out on the right side of your screen. Click “Upload audio” to upload the audio or video file.

Once completed, you will see the transcription on the right side of your screen. The transcription remains attached to whatever document you had open when you asked Word to do the transcription.

If you know the names of the speakers, you can change them. Mouse over one of the time stamps, click the pencil icon. Type in the name of the speaker. Be sure to check the “Change all Speaker [x]” box.

If the sound quality of the audio is pretty good, Word should do fine with the transcription. It’s probably worth a proof listen, though. Click the play button in the transcription box. As the recording plays, the related transcription will be editable.

When you’re happy with the transcription, click the “Add to document” button at the bottom of the transcription pane. Choose whether you want just the text, the text and speakers, the text and timestamps, or the text, speakers, and timestamps.

Accent considerations

How does Word transcription do with accented English? I downloaded this audio file from the Speech Accent Archive and ran it through Word’s transcription. The transcription was spot on.

In Zoom 5.10.0 (released March 21, 2022), we have some new features that instructors and their students might appreciate. This release is a manual download. Get it here.

First, animal avatars. You can find the menu next to virtual backgrounds and video filters. Mouse over each avatar to see what the Zoom developers think it is. I’m pretty sure that what they call a grizzly bear (last one in the second row and first in the third row) is a groundhog.

If you’ve used Zoom’s video filters to, for example, wear a virtual hat or glasses, you’ve experienced Zoom’s facial detection software. They’re using the same technology here, but instead of just virtual glasses that stay on your virtual face, you have an entire animal superimposed on your head. As your head, mouth, eyes, and nose move, so do those of your animal avatar.

Here’s the first million dollar question for all of you instructors who are looking at the blank video screens of your students: If your students could replace their faces with an animal avatar, would they be willing to turn on their webcams? And the second million dollar question: Would you prefer to teach a bunch of animals or blank video screens?

Other features

For those who assign students to the same breakout rooms time after time, when creating the breakout rooms you’ll be asked if you’d like to retain the settings. This is only available for recurring meetings, not for your regular Zoom room.

When students are in breakout rooms, we can share our screen to those breakout rooms, and on that shared screen we can play audio and video. On the share screen page, check the “Share sound,” “Optimize for video clip,” and “Share to breakout rooms” boxes.

You can find the full list of updates here. As a quick note, be aware that when Zoom talks about “Chat features,” they do not meet the in-meeting chat. They mean Zoom Chat. It’s Zoom’s built-in chat functionality that is completely separate from the in-meeting chat.

For Windows users, there is free collection of utilities called PowerToys that add some functionality to Windows. While there are a dozen tools in PowerToys, there are two I’m particularly enamored with: mouse utilities and video conference mute.

Working with two or three screens, it can be a challenge to find my mouse pointer. Frankly, I’m tired of moving my mouse around and glancing from screen to screen hoping to catch the movement. With mouse utilities, pressing the left CTRL button on my keyboard twice darkens all screens and gives my pointer a spotlight. In the screenshot below, my mouse pointer was in the center of this circle. Because my screen capture tool doesn’t capture the mouse pointer, we’ll have to pretend that the poorly drawn red arrow is my mouse pointer. Clicking a mouse button removes the spotlight.  

The second tool I use from the PowerToys suite is video conference mute. Regardless of the conference app, on the keyboard, pressing WINDOWS + SHIFT + Q instantly turns off the microphone and the camera.

These are the other tools that may be useful to me, but I haven’t had occasion to use them yet.

Always on Top: Pin a window so that it remains on top of other windows

FancyZones: Create a layout for the different windows that you have open, and then quickly enable that layout whenever you need it.

ImageResizer: Resize a bunch of images in one fell swoop.

PowerRename: Change the names on a bunch of files, also in one fell swoop.

Shortcut Guide: With a keyboard shortcut, you can view all of the keyboard shortcuts available for a particular window.

The remaining tools as of this writing are:

PowerToys Awake: Keep your computer from going to sleep.

Color Picker: Get the color code (HEX, RGB, or HSL) for any pixel on your screen.

Keyboard Manager: Remap any key on your keyboard. Caution: Do this only if you have a very good reason.

PowerToys Run: This looks to be a quick search tool for your computer’s files, folders, and programs.

File Explorer add-ons: Preview uncommon file types in file explorer. One file type it lists is pdfs, however, Microsoft has added this functionality to file explorer. No need to use PowerToys to preview pdfs.

Because they add utilities to this suite, by the time you read this, there may be more options available than listed in this blog post.

Seriously, if you have more than one screen, being able to spotlight your mouse pointer will be a game changer.

Zoom has new question options available on in the latest version 5.8.3. This version is not an automatic update, so you’ll need to download it manually.

Account owners and admins can enable advanced polling to allow meeting hosts to build advanced polls or quizzes that contain multiple question/answer types, allow for images, and automatically record answers. New question/answer types include match combinations, rank answers, and fill in the blank. This feature requires version 5.8.3 or higher and currently must be enabled by Zoom. (https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201361953)

But big caveat: “Users using older versions of Zoom will not be able to participate in polls with new question types or take quizzes.” Anyone in your Zoom meeting who is not using an updated version of Zoom will not be able to answer the new question types. These question

To turn on the new poll options, go to settings by logging in at zoom.us. In the “In Meeting (Basic),” find “Meeting Polls/Quizzes.” Make sure the toggle switch to the right is set to on (blue), check the box next to “Allow host to create advanced polls and quizzes,” and click Save.

New question options are matching, rank order, short answer, and long answer.

We can make it a quiz, if we’d like. That allows us to include several questions in one quiz. For non-text-based questions, we must identify the correct answers.

One of the advantages of using the Canvas learning management system is that it is built on a platform that makes it easy to make it do things that its inherent programming doesn’t allow it to do. By “easy,” I mean easy for those who know how to write the scripts and easier for us who only need to install the scripts others have written.

Using a web browser add-in called Tampermonkey (yes, it is called Tampermonkey; download for Chrome; download for Firefox), we can run scripts in your browser that will change how Canvas behaves. For example, there is a Tampermonkey script that allows you to export data from your scored rubrics. There is a speedgrader enhancement that allows you to click one button to submit a comment and advance to the next student. There is another Tampermonkey script that allows you to reorder the criteria in a rubric. Yet another script allows you to add custom columns to your gradebook; I’ve added “preferred name,” “fun facts,” “challenges,” and “major” to mine.

The good folks at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) have a page that lists many Canvas enhancements. After you’ve installed Tampermonkey, take a look at their page. When you find an OIT-provided enhancement you’d like, click the “Using <name of enhancement>” bar directly under the enhancement’s description. Click the link to the “<name of enhancement> source page”. On that page, click the Install button. Done. You are good to go.

For example, I have installed the OIT Custom Columns Manager. When I visit my Canvas gradebook, I have two new buttons: + Column and Delete Column. Also, I can see the Tampermonkey icon in my browser’s add-on bar has the number 1 on it. That means that Tampermonkey is running one script on this page.

At the bottom of the OIT Canvas Enhancements page is a section titled “Community-Provided Enhancements.” Many of these scripts have been written by James Jones, a Canvas master (visit his GitHub page to access all of his scripts).

A quick troubleshooting note. Some Canvas courses are hosted by Canvas’s parent company Instructure. Those courses have an instructure.com web address. Other courses are hosted by institutions. Those courses have a canvas.xxx.edu web address. Since the scripts run on webpages, the scripts have to have a web address included in them so Tampermonkey knows when it should run a particular script. Click on the Tampermonkey icon in your browser and select Dashboard. Click on the script name to see the code.

Near the top of the OIT script for the Custom Column Manager, we see this:

// @include https://canvas.*.edu/*/gradebook
// @include https://*.*instructure.com/*/gradebook

This means that the script will run on both website sources.

Some of the community-provided enhancements, though, only have the instructure.com line. If your instance of Canvas is at instructure.com, you’re good to go. For the rest of us, we need to add the line:

// @include https://canvas.*.edu/*/gradebook [The ending of the url will be different depending on the script. Just make sure the ending matches the ending of the instructure.com line.]

One more caveat. If you use Canvas on, say, your home computer and your work computer, you will need to install Tampermonkey and whatever scripts you’re using on both computers. And if you move back and forth between Chrome and Firefox, again, you’ll need to add the scripts to both browsers.

If you run into any trouble, email me at sue@suefrantz.com.

Here are the scripts I have installed, if you’re looking for a starting place. Highly recommended: All Courses Sort, Custom Column Manager, Export Rubric Scores (a wealth of assessment data), and Sort a Rubric.

Some people, for a large number of reasons, have an easier time understanding written content when it is read aloud. The course management systems are getting better at this—such as Canvas’s Immersive Reader—but they still have a ways to go. Immersive Reader, for example, at the time of this writing does not work with discussions or quizzes.

The web browser add-in Read Aloud for Firefox (download here) and Chrome (download here) does a pretty good job at reading text on a webpage. After Read Aloud is installed, navigate to any webpage and click the newly-added loud speaker icon on your browser’s add-in bar. The pop up will show you what Read Aloud will be reading. Press the play button to start.

Pressing the stop button at the top of the Read Aloud pop up will get you a smaller pop up where you can access settings.

Voice options include Google Translate, but don’t bother. When I chose Spanish, only the numbers and symbols were rendered in Spanish. Everything else was read aloud in English, albeit by a Spanish-accented speaker.

Set the speed, the pitch, and the volume according to your preferences. Text highlighting may or may not be aligned with what Read Aloud is reading. If you find the highlighting distracting, turn it off.