For example, as Roomers gather and take their seats, they can chat with each other, and they can see that I'm present in the room and setting up for class. What do the Zoomers see? If I've just arrived, the students in the room know I'm present, but until I login to my computer and launch Zoom, the students attending virtually have no information about what is happening in the room. If I happen to be running late, the students in the room would be able to see that. So if class had to start late, they'd understand why - but the students on Zoom would just see the "Waiting for the Host to start the Meeting…" screen. They can't tell if I'm present but have forgotten to turn on Zoom, or if I'm in the room getting set up, or…
Then there's the similar issue of how to allow the Zoomers to chat with each other casually before class starts.
Here's how I'm addressing both of these. First, I've set up my Zoom meeting to "Allow join before host," so that the Zoomers can login at any point before I launch the meeting from inside the classroom. An unfortunate side effect of this is that, because I've also set up my meetings to automatically record to the cloud, I routinely have a student or two who join but forget to unmute, so the initial part of the recording is audio of them listening to salsa music, or watching a baseball game…and I have to trim that out of the video before posting it for the class.
To give my Zoomers a signal that everything is going according to plan before class starts, I've created a visual slide that I project (both through Zoom and also to the Room) as soon as Zoom launches:
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| Example before-class slide |
This slide provides the current date, as well as a list of resources that all students (Roomers and Zoomers) should prepare to use during class. This is useful for students to do using pre-class time. Routine use of this approach will help online students understand when everything is proceeding according to plan before class is supposed to start.
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