Attached are useful tips and tricks for video conferencing or online teaching from home or an office. This guide covers the best practices and recommendations for all forms of video conferencing and live online learning interactions. Examples include: - Zoom - Canvas Conferences (Big Blue Button) - Google Hangout

Zoom offers several Zoom Education Webinar sessions each week with a live host to answer your questions, and focus on the following topics:  How to download Zoom applications and join a Zoom meeting How to schedule a meeting and send out invitations In-meeting controls and differentiation tools (including the waiting room, share screen, breakout rooms) We also have the following short videos to help teachers get up and running with Zoom: Zoom 101: Breakout Rooms Zoom 101: Polling (In-meeting) Zoom 101: Manage Participants (In-depth)  How to use Breakout Rooms Screen Share & Annotation for EDU Comprehensive Guide to Educating Through Zoom How to use Waiting Rooms to Manage Office Hours & Drop-In Visitor Times Comprehensive Guide to Educating Through Zoom

If your distance participants are having trouble hearing you or other people in the classroom, please check the following items: 1. Is the light on the Samson microphone on the teaching station amber or green? If it is amber, that means the mic is muted. Gently touch the small chrome button under the mic icon with your finger. No need to push, it is touch sensitive. The light should turn green and make the mic active. 2. There is a selector switch on the front of the mic that has three positions. Please be sure the selector switch is in the middle position which is noted with an "O" . 3. Go into Zoom and start your call. In the lower left-hand corner click the small up arrow ^ next to the microphone icon. Then select "Audio Settings." Under "Microphone" uncheck the box that says "Automatically adjust volume." Also on the volume slider directly above that, slide the indicator all the way to the right so the mic is at full volume. Exit the audio settings box.

Generally speaking, it is not advised for multiple computers to join the same Zoom Meeting (or Webinar) while physically in the same room. There are times when someone might want/need to join an Zoom meeting without audio. A common example is if there is a student in the classroom that needs to participate in a call's chat or to allow a person in the room to share their computer screen at some point in the meeting. The reason that it is not advised to have 2 or more connections to the same zoom call located in the same room is because Zoom (and all other web conferencing tools are built with the assumption that there is only 1 connection per location. When an additional connection is made that can be picked up by the other computer's microphone, a loop is created. Once an audio loop is started within a session, a sound the best case scenario is a significant echo will take place throughout the call. A more common event is a Feedback Loop where a sound is made and then the echo builds and becomes louder on each echo and the echo's become closer and closer together until a steady tone is the only audio. The only way to stop this is to either end the meeting, have all but one connection in the room log out of the meeting or have everyone mute their microphone and speakers at the same time. Any of these options will break the audio loop. To prevent an audio feedback loop from forming while multiple connections are in the same room: Step 1 - Log into the Zoom app installed on your computer. Step 2 - In the upper right-hand corner of the Zoom window, Click on the gear icon to open the settings menu. Step 3 - In the left-hand column, select Audio. Step 4 - Towards the bottom of the Audio menu list, you will see a checkbox for Automatically join audio by computer when joining a meeting. This checkbox needs to be UNCHECKED in order to prevent feedback reliably. With this box unchecked, you will be presented with a pop-up window for all future Zoom sessions asking you to connect audio to the meeting. Please note that your camera (if active) is visible at this point and the host/other participants will know that you are in the meeting. Step 5 - Depending on your need for audio in each meeting, one of the following will apply. Without Audio - If you need to join a meeting without audio, close this pop-up and you will enter the meeting with no audio connection. With Audio - If you need to join a meeting with audio. Click the blue button and you will enter the meeting with your default Zoom microphone and speaker settings.