Zoom

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 asRead More →

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.Read More →

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.). 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.   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 threeRead More →

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 theRead More →

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 typesRead More →