Last week I gave myself 2 challenges for my teaching in Zoom. I accomplished one goal, but not the other. The goal I didn’t accomplish was having a large image for students to write into. One idea I had was a giant key that would stand for “key takeaways” from the day’s class. I just couldn’t find an image I liked, and I also ran out of time to get there. So I’ll try again this coming week.

I was successful with having students use the stamp function. The class was research and design; the topic was social significance and statement of the problem. After presenting what these 2 constructs were, I had the students refer to an article and evaluate the article for how well the authors addressed the key elements we had just discussed. I try to vary this – on example 1, I just asked 2 students to look at the article and give their thoughts. On example 2, to draw everybody in, I asked the whole class to make their mark. While I could’ve asked about individual ratings, it seemed like we were all around the same place, so I just noted that no-one said it was out of this world, and asked the class to comment what the authors could’ve done to push it closer to that ideal.

In a different class, we combined the table idea (which is typically my go-to) with the stamp feature on zoom. This is for an intro class on Health Service Psychology, so the students are learning about values of psychology. When in face-to-face class, I usually have this as a handout and have them self-evaluate. I really liked having this group activity via Zoom (So the challenge will be how to keep this when we do go back F2F). As you can see, students stamped how they felt about each one.

If you haven’t discovered this yet, when you finish your annotating activity, if you don’t erase it, it will stay there even when you move to the next slide, unless you erase it. Sometimes I forget and have to take a moment to erase it. For this activity, though, it was a bonus. I started by duplicating 2 slides in Powerpoint – one which was the simple table above for them to annotate, and the next which I had created beforehand that showed how the psychologists in the study rated. The “ratings” were purple stars. By keeping their ratings, we got to see in an instant how our group as a whole compared. This turned into a conversation about the comparison. As an aside, I was disappointed about the ratings on the value of career-related issues, but in the discussion, many explained that they were thinking about day-to-day services they would be providing, and to whom (many were interested in working with kids, or trauma) – so that made that rating a bit more acceptable. 🙂

So, two more Zoom teaching days in the bag. What’s on for next week? I’ll probably still seek to use the idea of an image to have them build on. Maybe I’ll play with the whiteboard function, although I also like the idea of being creative with the Zoom backgrounds. Just came across this helpful site with some innovative ideas that I’ll be considering. Good to have options!