In May of this year I wrote tips from my five years on Zoom for those of you who were just entering its world. Since May I’ve learned another five years’ worth of things about Zoom. I’m going to roll them out over the next few days, with or without video instruction:
Breakout rooms are way better than they were—because breakout rooms on Zoom are a key teaching tool, and much of what is driving Zoom’s use is literally or essentially educational, over the past several months Zoom has met consumer demand with lots of increased features on breakout rooms.
- To be able to even use breakout rooms
- the feature of breakout rooms must be enabled in the settings in advance of the meeting (cannot be retrofitted once the meeting is underway)
- settings can only be changed by a person who has the actual login to the account, not just host credentials
- only host can set them up once the feature is enabled–no co-hosts
- Here’s the new features I like
- ability to create & name multiple rooms before anyone else enters the room
- ability to let people choose which room they enter (rather than cumbersomely being selected by the host or automatically assigned to a topic they don’t want)
- ability to automatically end breakout rooms at a certain time or give less warning
- ability to let co-hosts move directly from room to room freely.
- ability to move people to rooms without them having to select something
- can record and save chats in the rooms
- why breakout rooms are so useful and wonderful
- It means that one zoom account, provided it has capacity for the number of people that are likely to enter, can effectively create a whole school or conference
- This experience mimics a real life experience much more than the previous programming because people can enter a main room and then choose from a variety of topics and self select to enter those rooms or workshops or whatever you want to call them
- For whatever reason people love the experience of being shuttled through cyberspace from room to room. I think it feels like Star Trek transport.
- if you want to simulate a cocktail party or more of the kinds of random encounters that we all so miss these days, you can use the automatic breakout rooms to automatically assign and pop people into random groups of 3-4 for short conversations, then pop them into entirely different groups.
- Videoconferencing is at its best when it is able to do something better than in person would do so that it actually compensates for all the obvious downsides. In real life there is a lot of extra time involved in moving from one group of 3-4 people to an entirely new group of 3-4 people. In Zoom the reallocation is by automatic algorithm. This completely removes constraints of cliques, preferences and control, all of which are endemic to the human race but also prevent us from finding commonalities and connections with new people.
Still to come:
- new features and unsolicited advice on waiting rooms/links/passcodes
- how and why to hide non-video participants
- how to create a theater audience mode
- large meeting extensions to 500
- & more
what I’ve written before on this topic:
