Classroom Technology Updates for 13 November 2020

Hello Faculty & Staff:

In this update:

• Owl installation COMPLETE
• Google Meet now has breakout rooms, polling, and Q&A features.
• Fixing display settings [in the classroom]
• Sharing streaming content, e.g., Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney, etc., in Zoom or Meet.

Owl installation COMPLETE!

All of the Owl cameras have been installed in the classrooms. We have observed some quietness in the volume in some spaces. Please make sure that you go into your Google Meet or Zoom settings and make sure that the correct microphone and speakers are selected (both should be Owl).

Let us know if you encounter any issues with the tech. Several of the Owls came in with outdated firmware. Firmware is the software for the hardware. Firmware is the Owl's operating instructions/system. We are working to get all of the Owls up to the latest firmware release.

Google Meet now has breakout rooms, attendance, polling, and Q&A features

We know that many of you are Zoom fans, but we encourage you to take a look at the additional features are now available Google Meet. These include:

1. Automatically distribute recordings to your guest list when used in conjunction with calendar invitations.
2. Automatic Attendance. You will now get a spreadsheet emailed to you that contains who signed into the meeting and when they arrived and left the meeting.
3. Breakout Rooms. While meeting you pick how many breakout rooms you want and Meet will automatically and evenly divide your class into each room. You can reassign people to different rooms and then activate them. The presenter can enter and exit each room and students can come back to the common meeting to ask you questions.
4. Q&A. Once activated by the presenter, people can post questions in the Q&A feature. Once a question is posted, others in the class can vote it up by clicking the "thumbs up" icon. You can sort and respond to questions by the time they were posted or by their popularity (how many thumbs/upvotes received). 
5. Polling. Just like students can ask questions in the Q&A, you can poll your students using the polling feature. 
6. Direct Jamboard integration. Jamboard is a shareable whiteboard. You can use the Chromebooks in each classroom to write on a shared jamboard.
7. Custom backgrounds or blurring your background.
   
   
8. In addition to the spreadsheet of attendees, you will get information after the meeting containing a records of the Q&A activity, a transcript of the chat messages, and the results of any polls.
9. Streaming a meeting. Google meet allows up to 250 live participants in a meeting, but you can stream to up to an additional 100,000 view-only participants as long as they are signed in with their malone.edu account. This feature could be used to do an "all campus" meeting.

These are all included in the advanced features license. This license is automatically granted to all faculty and instructors. If you are not teaching and want access to these features, please let the IT help Desk know and we will activate a license for you.

Here are some resources for learning how to use Google Meet:

• Getting started with Google Meet including transitioning from Zoom and other tools
• More information on the newly added collaboration features
• Contact the IT Help Desk with questions about how you might utilize these features in your classroom or event.

Fix Display Settings Icons on desktop

One of the largest sources of Help button presses is when the three outputs/screens are not set up the way a faculty/instructor expects when [s]he comes into the classroom. To help address this problem, we have added three icons to the desktop of each classroom computer which will automatically configure the screens to the three most common configurations.

1. "Extended Display" - Three separate displays - both monitors and the projector behave as independent monitors.
2. "Duplicate Right Display" - Right/Second screen mirrored/duplicated to projector.
3. "Duplicate Left Display" - Left/Primary screen mirrored/duplicated to projector.

Sharing streaming content, e.g., Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney, etc., in Zoom or Meet

Please note that if you are planning to share copyrighted material that is being streamed via a service, you may have trouble including that on a screen share in both Meet and Zoom. The reason is that many of these services have copy protection which prevents their content from being shared via another service.

We recommend that you test sharing of potentially protected content in your synchronous platform prior to class. Be sure to talk to your department's library liaison if you want your students to see a particular online video as a class. They have access to additional streaming resources that can make it available to all your students. 

Several platforms have a "watch party" feature that allows subscribers to their services to watch the same content synchronously, but not all of your students will have accounts so care must be taken not to exclude those students.