how can we make our zoom sessions more engaging so that when we do our training we've got our
students more involved in this video I'm going to show you two great techniques I'm going to connect
to three technologies that can really add a lot of variety to the way that we deliver in zoom really
hope you like the video and as always if you do please like it please share it and I'd love to
know in the comments which of the techniques did you like the best let's get started so we're going
to start with a really fabulous technology called answer garden and this is brilliant for quickly
getting all your students to share their ideas together in one place obviously we can use the
chat window but that just comes up individually the idea with this is that super quickly we get
a cloud and there really isn't a faster cloud technology let me just show you i'm going to
click here and i'm going to ask a question to my students the question i'm going to ask them is
what do you like about learning languages okay so really simple question i want i'm having a
discussion i'm doing a language lesson with my students and i want to ask that question so just
write the question in answer garden i'll change it to 40 characters so they can write a longer answer
and then all i need to do is click on create now in the zoom session all i do now is share
that link so the students click on the link and then they can answer their the question so just
share that link straight away and any student for example i like meeting new people and immediately
they press enter that answer will appear on the screen so let's just do another one for example i
like um learning about cultures and so another students write in another answer and bang we
get all those answers together so immediately we got all these different answers together now i
frequently use this as a tool to quickly get students answers together and obviously what
we can do afterwards is screen share in zooms so you can see here an example of a
answer garden just really quick way of collecting together everyone's thoughts or everyone's ideas
now you don't only have to be limited to just one you know a single word you could get the
students to actually write sentences as well but it's just a great way of collecting together
all the students ideas in one place so you can see I've shared the link in the zoom window so
all the students would need to do is click on that link and then they can write their answer so they
can put their answer i love languages let's say okay and all the answers are coming together now
i'm just going to jump back to zoom what we can do once the students have answered the question
and if we're in the zoom session ourselves as a teacher we want to see how are they doing how
are they writing all we need to do is click here underneath and jump to the answer garden we're
not screen sharing so we can just check okay great the students are writing up their answers
come back to zoom and when we're ready we just simply click on screen share and then we can
share all the answers and say right guys let's see what you've been writing now i do this all
the time it's a great way of collecting together all the answers of the students in one place
if you want to learn more about using answer garden there's a video now that on the screen that
you can click on and link i'm now going to shift over to another technology that i love that i use
a lot and that's mentimeter and menti media is great because it's another activity that gets the
students engaged and i use this a lot when i want students to kind of choose for between options so
i've presented something and i want to say okay i want you now to vote on the thing that you like
the best or the comment on the thing you like the best or rank the thing you like the best again i
share the link the students click on it so they're doing something different a bit more variety
and then again once they finished i can open it up on the screen and we can see what all of
the class have have written or have shared or have voted on so let's just see how many meter works so
we're on the home page of mentee meter I'm going to click on new presentation this is a free tool
and I'm going to go call this one ranking activity okay and I'm going to click on present
presentation now the brilliant thing about Mentimeter is that you've got loads of different
activities that you can do with the students so you could give them a multiple choice question or
you can actually give them up to three questions or get them to do a word cloud activity rather
similar to answer garden but it's not as quick to set up so i prefer to use answer garden or an
open-ended discussion or they can scale something and i really like this one I use it a lot and are
ranking ranking works really well if you want say for example the students to vote on something
maybe you've presented a series of things and say okay which one do you like the best or which one
are you most interested in or what topic should we be discussing today or what feature of this
particular technology do you like the best so loads of different activities q a type an
answer select an answer what I'm going to do the first one is scale because I like this quite a lot
and it's so easy to make an activity so what I'm going to ask them for example in this one is what
tools how rank these tools let's just put that in there rank these tech tools so I'm going to get
students to or teachers in my case because I teach teachers and training organizations I'm going to
write zoom Microsoft teams I'm just going to get them to vote on perhaps which is their let's
say favourite technology so I'm going to perhaps Moodle just doing a really quick example here to
show you what i mean let's just do a couple more let's put in um blue button and perhaps we'll end
with putting in ed model okay so we give them a choice of different technologies and we want them
to rank these technologies now let's imagine that i've already presented these technologies to the
students or to the teachers now once i've written out the question you can see how quick it is to
do the question all i do is click on the share button and then i can share this link copy link so
if I was in a zoom session i would simply come back to my zoom session and share the link and
then the students can click and then do the activity now I'm going to quickly show you what
the activity looks like just so you get a feeling but the brilliant thing is that all that data is
instantly coming back to me so when I share the link what i actually do is i then screen share
the mentee meter because as the answers appear this will change and you can actually put it
in present mode so as the answers come onto the screen you will see that suddenly it will go five
or six or whatever depending on all the answers that the students write and it will also tell you
how many people have voted so it's brilliant to use live and to share the answers on the screen
that which then you can discuss afterwards so let's actually look at what the student does
so when the students click on the link that you've shared in zoom this is what they see
and they simply vote so they can add up whatever they think okay and they can now we can change
the score for example if we want to have it more than five points we just simply put our votes on
our favorite technologies we click on submit now if i jump back to the teachers view you'll notice
that those answers have been immediately added in to the view that the teacher gets
there we are we can see the data and as other people vote the data will change so
everything is live and it's a great technology to use obviously what you want to do is screen
share this so that once the students are voted they can see what is happening on the screen
and who's voting now just a couple of tips when you're working with this technology for example
you can change the scale you can have say from 1 to 10 and you can change the comments so for
example I might have don't like okay right up to love okay so you can choose the type
of ranking you want depending obviously on what you present just a really quick break from the
video just to promote my website if you like the video on zoom and you want more videos come over
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thanks let's get back to the video if you want to know more about working with Mentimeter there's
a link on the screen now that you can click on and learn some of the advanced features
but what I'm going to do now is show you another technology i use and this one's different the work
with google Jamboard let me take you through some techniques that you can use with google
Jamboard that can really make your sessions much more engaging so google Jamboard is a free
technology as long as you have a Gmail account I'm going to click here to go to my jamboards
it's a technology that I've been starting to use more and more simply because it's so quick
and easy to use if i just click down here on new jamboard the idea that jambles are kind of like
interactive whiteboards or electronic corkboards and students can add up all their ideas onto the
screen now there's one thing that we need to do before we start normally we write up the question
so we click here and i'm going to say the question is what is your favorite technology so again this
is a great way of getting students to interact together and suggest ideas now there's a couple
of nice features of the way that it works so the first thing you have to do is click on share
and change it so that all the students can access the jamboard and add their ideas and
to do that you need to come down to here switch this and change it from anyone with the link
can view to anyone with the link can edit that is the key button then you copy the link and
that is what you would share in your zoom session so back in zoom I would then share that link
so that the students could then therefore click on the uh Jamboard and uh and simply
begin to interact with it so any student could now click on that and it opens up the Jamboard
and they can begin to add up their ideas now the interesting thing is that they can do a lot more
than we can do for example with answer garden and I'm going to just show you some of the
things that the students can do so let's imagine that I'm on Jamboard and I want to add a comment
one of the nice things I can do is write a sticky note so I click on here and I'm going to say
ma I really like working with word wall it's a technology that I make a lot of use of now notice
straight away that you can write a lot you're not restricted to just a few words so it's much richer
you can also choose a different colour so that we can have a bit of variety in the different
ideas stick out and often i asked the person to write their name afterwards so i know who wrote
that contribution okay first sticky is up on the screen now if another student logs in let's just
do that so i can see now that someone's already written on the screen and i can add my idea so i
can click here and say this is my idea so this is the second student now adding up their idea
now and then they would add that now notice that the sticky notes all sit one on top of the other
now this is actually quite interesting because when the teacher then goes to screen sharing
let's now jump back to zoom so when this teacher screen shares what they can do now
if they screen share the screen is the teacher can say right let's look at the ideas so first one
talk about that or maybe comment on it and then perhaps delete it and then bring the next one into
the middle and then talk about that one etcetera but we're not limited when we work with Jamboard
in this way we can add text so we can click here and just mark on the screen and start to write so
we can add text this way as well so students can do as i said sticky notes the sticky notes sit
on top of each other they can also add text now the other great thing is that you can extend this
so for example you could say if you was in a class you could have more than one page and one
thing you can do for example let's say you've got five groups working so then you can have
in the breakout rooms group one group two group three group four group five and each group would
have a page where they would add their ideas now what you can do as well is even name the pages
but you don't really need to do that because it does tell the students at the top of the page
which page number they're on one simple tip if you're going to do this make sure that you
share the link to the google jamboard before the students move into breakout rooms so
put them share the link in the chat window and then they can move into breakout rooms
and then one person in each group can open up go to the correct page and then add their content
remember to click on the share button make sure that you when you share the link in the
chat window before you put the students into breakout rooms that you have got it set to can
edit really important otherwise the students can't actually write into the jam board love
to know which of those ideas you like the best please write your ideas in the comments section
if you want more free videos please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com there's a special
section on zoom that you might find really useful and a special section on teaching online
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finally on the screen now there are some more videos
about working with zoom that you might find really useful and thank you very much