Teaching Effectively with Zoom: A practical guide to engage your students and help them learn

by Dan Levy

We tend to spend a lot of our class preparation time planning what we will do in the classroom (deciding how we will explain things, designing and tweaking PowerPoint slides to no end, etc.) and not as much time thinking about what our students will be doing in the classroom.

How do you spark curiosity, challenge assumptions, enable discovery, and inspire learning?”[3]

The bottom line seems to be that you should not assume that you will be able to engage with the same amount of material online as when you teach in person, and that your pedagogic approach and style will likely determine how much less you will be able to engage with virtually.

Finally, you can have a maximum number of breakout rooms (somewhere between twenty and fifty, depending on the number of participants), so if you have a very large class, take this into account in deciding group size for breakout rooms.

I hope that one day Zoom will make it possible to have students self-select into the groups they want and/or allow the instructor to send students to different breakout rooms according to how they answered a poll question.

In this scenario, it would be best for you and your students to use the “Speaker View” (instead of the “Gallery View”) in Zoom.

Consider using spotlight to force speaker view.

If you can’t think of a key reason to display the video in class, you can often save valuable class time by having students view it before or after class.

Otherwise, you need to stop sharing one application (e.g., PowerPoint) and start sharing the other one (e.g., your internet browser).

If you are using Keynote, use the new feature called “Play Slideshow in Window” in the Play menu to accomplish the same goal.

Can use iPad as remote.

Apple pencil

Apple Pencil

Yet as many of us are transitioning to teach our courses online, we are being encouraged to think more carefully about what material we should try to teach in our live sessions (synchronously) and what material we should ask students to engage with on their own time (asynchronously).

You have to be much more deliberate about building community online than in person.

There are more ways of engaging your students in an online classroom than in a physical one. Leverage this fact to help you reach your goals.