Brent Warner 0:01
This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season Three, Episode Two: All the Updates for Fall.

Tim Van Norman 0:19
Welcome to the HigherEdTech Podcast. I am Tim VanNorman, the Instructional Technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner 0:26
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:34
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. Hello, Brent, anything new as you’re just starting classes? You know, professional development week here at IVC. So…

Brent Warner 0:47
Yeah, I mean, all is new, I guess I am. So summer, you know, I’m a little rusty with the podcasting. We took our break during the summer. I, I have been promoted, I guess I don’t know, depending on who you ask if this is a promotion or not. But I’m a you know, department co chair now. So that’s some other different and new responsibilities. You know, things are moving along. There’s just a lot of stuff to do. It’s it’s hard these days, there’s lots of changes going on in the schools and in the ways students are trying to learn and you know, how the tech affects all of those things. So keep them pretty. keeping me on my toes for sure. How about you?

Tim Van Norman 1:33
Yeah, you’re you’re definitely busy. This is, this is a fun week for me, I get to take all of the stuff that I’ve done for the last year and present it. And I love that it’s a great, it’s a great thing to do. And I get lots of people to listen and stuff and and see what new things are coming out, which is part of why we did this show as well as there’s been a lot of things just over the summer that have come up. So why don’t we go ahead and hop into it a little bit.

Brent Warner 2:04
Okay, sounds good.

Tim Van Norman 2:06
So first of all, Brent, “Mr. Google” for us. We wanted to talk about for everybody else, we’re wanting to talk about changes in Google and Microsoft for this first segment. And we’re gonna get into zoom and stuff for the second segment, but we wanted to talk about some of these changes that people might have missed. And maybe they will encourage you to try something, maybe they’ll encourage you not to whatever is appropriate for you. But wanted to just throw some stuff out there. Because yes, there’s lots and lots of lists. But these are things that we looked at and thought would be important and good for us, for somebody in a classroom setting in a school setting to know about whether you implement or not. And there’s a couple of them that we’re going to get into, especially when we start talking about Canvas, I will tell you flat out that we are not implementing it at IVC yet, for various reasons. And, you know, who knows, in a month or two, we might change our minds, but that’s okay. It’s, it’s about understanding what we’re dealing with. So first of all, Google, Brent. Google just doesn’t stop updating.

Brent Warner 3:18
I can’t keep up. I mean, honestly, like, I love this stuff. And I’m like, okay, and they’re doing all these announcements. The weird thing with Google over the summer, is they made these announcements, but they kind of made them several times. And they did one, one big, like, Hey, this is our show day announcement things. And then they told other stuff that’s going on. And I’m like, okay, but you’ve already been talking about that stuff for a while. So I’m not sure why this is a showcase type of setup. But regardless, we do have quite a few things. Tim, you found a number, I found a number of things that are either have come out and or are coming. Because a lot of these things are like, you know, they announced them and then they kind of do slow rollouts a little bit with Google. So you might have to keep an eye on your, your different Google programs and, you know, workspace areas to figure out what whether or not this is currently available or may become available shortly after you listen at some point. So let’s jump into a few of these. Google meet I don’t use a lot, but you found a few things going on with Google meet.

Tim Van Norman 4:23
So raising your hand will automatically lower after a period of time. I don’t know how many times I’ve been in a meeting, not in Google meet necessarily, but in zoom where somebody’s hand is up because they don’t lower it. Or long time. I think that’s

Brent Warner 4:40
another question. Did you want to ask? That’s definitely one of the zoom bingo points, is like yes. Okay, cool. So that’s a good one.

Tim Van Norman 4:51
Background noise reduction, especially when we’re working at home. There’s just noises that come up in the background that don’t necessarily need to be picked up by the mic, but do So they’re trying to automatically reduce noise. And everybody’s trying to do that, we’ll see who’s successful first, and then one that I really liked. And I could only find for sure that this is an iOS. So this might be another one of those Mac better than I then windows, but you can replace or blur your background. And the meeting, it looked like I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was windows or not. But the nice part is automatically blur and stuff, basically what we have in zoom all the time, but Google me just hadn’t had it as well yet. So that’s, that’s really nice. The next one, I saw backup and sync, this is really cool when you get in and start using it. You can have on your computer. If you load backup and sync, you can hook up both your personal account and your business account, your IVC, for instance, oh, this

Brent Warner 6:01
is something I want to have years ago,

Tim Van Norman 6:02
Ryan, I basically have two drives. So I found this out by accident as somebody was like, Well, what happens if I and I’m like, let’s try it, it said add an account. And sure enough, all of a sudden, a G and an H drive showed up for daily for Windows. But this is Windows and Mac, as far as I can tell. But it will automatic, it will let you have both. So now copying files between the two accounts is just like if you’ve got two flash drives.

Brent Warner 6:33
Tim, do you remember me asking you for this when we turned on Google and IVC? I’m like, how do I get my other things out? And you’re like, this is gonna be Yeah, this is it was a very slow and painful process to get like, because I had all these things from my other classes. And even still today, sometimes I’ll be like, I’ll go in and I’ll be like, oh, here’s this file. I remember I made this, I’m looking for it. And it’s it’s like a few years old. And it was from my private gmail account when I was just doing it on my own in the back end. So now I can just link it and bring it right over. That is so much better. Okay. So,

Tim Van Norman 7:09
by the way, many of these things are because somebody has asked, oh, yeah, and I found it and I’m like, Hey, you know, you want to know, here’s the logo,

Brent Warner 7:17
let’s make sure we find a link on how to do that and put it into the show notes. Because I’m sure there are people listening that are gonna want to know, like how to do that.

Tim Van Norman 7:25
So just for your information, it’s very simple. Once you have added Google Drive to your computer, you literally click on the setup, click on the drive, click on settings. And under preferences, I believe it is you add an account. Great. It’s really simple. And it’s built in. It’s not like you’re doing something funky or anything like that. It’s great. So,

Brent Warner 7:47
okay, good. You made by date. So there we go.

Tim Van Norman 7:51
Hey, I like it. The next one that I found, had to do with Google Sheets. And I’m getting into Google Sheets a lot more lately, because it’s really easy to share files with people and stuff like that. But one of the things that I didn’t like is I couldn’t select multiple tabs and do something in Excel, I can select multiple tabs and I can hide them. Otherwise, you got to individually do that stuff. Now they’ve got it built in. And if you look at a video of it, that’s exactly the example they use is hiding tabs. And that is so nice to be able to do that. I’m sure they’re going to expand that to a lot more features that are available under that multiple tabs. But anytime you can do multiple tabs in in Google Sheets. That’s really nice.

Brent Warner 8:38
Great, great. Good. And then a couple more things. Chat. I know there’s a couple of things going on with chat. I am still kind of messy on Google Chat features, because they have so many of them, and they kind of close and open different ones. So Tim, just be clear. In your current understanding his chat is Google Chat, the one that they are tending to focus on now or is chat just becoming a part of Meet.

Tim Van Norman 9:10
That’s the problem with Microsoft is every time you turn around, each tool is integrated into the other tools such that it’s really hard to know where one ends and one begins. So the one thing about that is they are completely replacing Google Hangouts. Okay. So with chat, now, if you look at chat, the difference between chat and Meet is almost zero. They they really integrate very nicely together. But they are expanding a little bit in the chat. And, for instance, you can share slide presentations with the people in your chat. You can edit them together, you can present in chat, as well. That’s a really cool feature. Meet isn’t really designed for collaboration. I’m that way. And so I that may be the difference between meet and chat. But I, you, you asked a really good question that unfortunately I can’t I can’t, every time I think I have an answer, there should have been there’s another integration that I, you know, I doesn’t get don’t get. So it’s..

Brent Warner 10:17
It’s like shooting at a moving target.

Tim Van Norman 10:20
Which is a good thing. Yeah,

Brent Warner 10:21
It’s great, it’s great. But it’s hard to keep up with some of the time so. So with the, with Google Docs, and all the Google workspace stuff, which used to be G Suite, and you know, they just keep changing those names again, but they’re there are a bunch of announcements that came out kind of related to productivity directly inside of things like docs, and sheets and things. And so Tim, I just wanted to share a few of these because they are pretty cool. And like I said, They’re, they’re kind of trickling out in release. So I haven’t gotten all of these yet, but some of them are coming. So a couple, you can do app mentions of people and files and meetings directly inside of Google Docs, which is pretty great. So you just type in att. And for example, if you said at, you know, Sunday presentation, Sunday? Friday presentation, then that that Google slide might just pop up right there. And you can just click on it and have it directly inside a link to it inside of your doc, you they also are moving this is great. I think they’re moving towards page lists, Docs, so they’re not based on, they can still be of course based on traditional paper, but they’re no longer really bound to that, which is just like where digital documents have been needing to go for a long time, right? Like word count makes sense to me, printing sometimes makes sense. But we don’t do a lot of printing comparatively anymore. And so they’re kind of moving away in certain ways from the traditional eight and a half by 11, or a four size paper as a default size. And so you can kind of shift around and work with your documents in different ways. cool things like adding an emoji, adding in giving recommendations for inclusive language. There are all these connected checklists things, Tim, I, we were talking about this in the pre show, but you can go and you can go and basically default some template information right into it. So you could just say, Hey, we’re going to have our meeting. And it’ll bring up a template for that meeting. And if you already have that information, so it’s like, what date is it what is who you know, who’s in attendance, like who has action items, and it’ll just bring that all up so that you don’t have to copy and paste it from previous ones. There is one now because of the chat conversation meet coming directly into Google Docs and Sheets and Slides. So you can actually open up a meet, meet meeting, I guess, right inside of your Google Docs. So it’ll just pop open your video chat right there while you’re working. So instead of the chat bar on the side, you can do that. And then there’s a couple things going on with sheets, timeline functionality, some of the things that you had mentioned there before. So anyways, it’s worth taking a peek at, they’re not all out. But they do seem really cool and really useful. And so we’ll put a link to this into the show notes as well. But lots of interactive interaction between the different Google workspace tools, so between sheets and docs, and between, you know, Docs, and slides, or whatever. And so integrating them together and kind of, maybe they’re trying to blend them a little bit so that they’re not so they don’t feel like it’s a separate thing and a separate thing. But it’s like, oh, I need to have this functionality in here a little bit more. And they might kind of be moving to a world where these are not all separate things.

Tim Van Norman 13:54
And remember, when you hear collaboration, or any terms that are like, oh, we’re going to be working together better in business. Think of your classroom. In all of these cases, you could use this with students, students could use it with each other in such a way that it can just enhance their learning experience. And that’s what we’re always looking for. How do we enhance the learning experience for for our students and have them do a better job and stuff? So this is there’s some really cool things that they’ve come out with and Bates, we were looking at, add a list of 12 or 15 different items, and you had like six of them. Yeah, so there’s a lot. There’s a lot that they’re coming out with. And that was just since that was produced on May 18. That particular one, so it’s very recent. And there’s a lot of stuff since then.

Brent Warner 14:51
Yeah, we call this episode “All the Updates”, but there’s literally no way we could do all the updates (laughter)

Tim Van Norman 14:56
Exactly.

Brent Warner 14:58
So let’s talk a little bit about Microsoft, Tim, because there’s some cool stuff there. And some people have given me sideways looks for not talking about Microsoft enough on this. So I know I’m guilty of talking more Google, but let’s talk some Microsoft.

Tim Van Norman 15:14
So these first several, in fact, in a lot of ways, you kind of need to use OneDrive with Microsoft to get a lot of these features. And by the way, the same thing with Google

Brent Warner 15:25
People love OneDrive. People who are into it are really, you know, into it. I know a lot of people are like, this is the thing. So yeah.

Tim Van Norman 15:32
Right. Microsoft has been improving OneDrive, they’ve had issues with it in the past. And so especially when it comes to Mac’s, but they have been improving it a lot. And so we’ll leave it at that. But real time collaboration in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, if you’re used to the way they’re doing it in Google, Google Docs, and sheets, and power and slides, it’s become almost the same thing

Brent Warner 16:02
Hmm… where’d they come up with that idea?

Tim Van Norman 16:04
Yeah. but Google Slides is not quite the level of Excel, the application. I’m sorry, Google Sheets, Google Sheets. Yeah, that too, Google Sheets is not quite the level of Excel for for really advanced features. Now you can do those same things in Excel itself. And that is really cool. That’s really nice. Again, you need to be using OneDrive to make that work properly. But it will work very well. Teams can now be built basically, in app integration with the rest of office 365. So you can be working in teams in Word. and stuff, it’s a really deep thing, or one note, items can be added to Outlook. That is, to basically be able to add your notes into your email is amazing.

Brent Warner 17:01
Yeah, and we might we might need to do a whole show I think about One Note, and about teams, maybe like maybe do a Microsoft episode, because we do. I know that our faculty is kind of leaning more towards Google for the most part, but our, our classified staff is like all about teams. And all you know, it’s like all, you know, there’s a huge, like, you know, half of half of the people on campus are using in a totally different way. And we want to make sure that we talk about that and understand how that affects the school as well. So, so let’s kind of put that on the, we’ll put that on the notes for the future. “To do” Yeah,

Tim Van Norman 17:37
Absolutely. Absolutely. So along these lines, also, Microsoft now can will let you use your mouse as a laser pointer in PowerPoint. We did that before, but it was always an arrow moving around your screen. Now it will let it do as a laser pointer, which is a really neat feature. One thing I really want to look into is they’re claiming now that you can do a lot more editing of PDFs in Word, oh, without losing without losing the formatting. That’s a huge deal. I, as I said, I want to look into that one.

Brent Warner 18:14
This is one of these things like, for me, it’s like, why didn’t this exist 20 years ago? Because it’s so… it’s such a weird thing working with PDFs, but Okay, let’s continue.

Tim Van Norman 18:24
Yep, it is. As long as you’re using OneDrive, you can resume reading your Word documents. Like if you’ve read the first 25 pages of a document, and you close it, you can reopen it, and it’ll come – You can have it go back to that page. 25. And you start at that point.

Brent Warner 18:43
Oh, so kind of like Kindle! And is that across devices, too? So if I open it on my iPhone, for example, what would it recognize that or not yet?

Tim Van Norman 18:51
It’s supposed to

Brent Warner 18:53
Cool. All right.

Tim Van Norman 18:54
So a lot of these features though, I want to look at and I want to see and play with and see how that goes. Yeah,

Brent Warner 18:58
Well, let’s put a disclaimer on all of these because we don’t totally trust Microsoft yet to do everything they say that they’re gonna do.

Tim Van Norman 19:06
They’re they’re doing parts of it. The question is, how far have they gone as far as we would like? And in fact, one of these things that I’m claiming is horrible. Okay, this is something I really hate. And in fact, Brent, you and I just tried to fix part of your account this morning on email. The email inbox can declutter itself. What that means is Microsoft goes through and figures out what it thinks is important to you, and leaves that up, but hides everything else. So students sending an email to you through Canvas might not be important. I disagree.

Brent Warner 19:45
Yeah. Well, the Microsoft bots might think it’s not important to the the student who needs to read that message and make sure they attend class. Probably would think it’s important after they found out that they they lost the message.

Tim Van Norman 20:00
And we’ve seen that happen, that’s how I came up, came out and saw a lot of this stuff. There’s the focus inbox, there’s a couple of different things that they’re doing. So this is still early stages, hopefully, you know, in five years, they’ll have fixed some of their bugs. But, yeah…

Brent Warner 20:17
Hopefully sooner than that. Okay, so there’s a lot of different stuff, we got some Google stuff, we got some Microsoft stuff, there’s plenty more coming out. So keep your eyes open. Because, you know, one of the things that I’m always guilty of is, like, whatever, you know, I never recognize that things are new. I’m just like, I don’t remember that from before. And so, you know, keep it Keep your eyes, your mind open, that some of these things might actually just be new features built in, because they just get sent and pushed into the programs that you’re using anyways. And so, you know, experiment with them, click on them when you see them.

Tim Van Norman 20:51
And that’s the beauty with online applications and, and automatic updates and stuff like that is they can push it down. Literally, if you look, I was looking at Google documentation, and they literally have day by day for this week, what they changed. And they can do that because it’s online. So there’s a lot of neat things do pay attention and look, if something doesn’t look what you’re looking for, or if you want to know, look for it. Often it’s there.

Brent Warner 21:24
Alright, so Tim, I’ve got today’s Zippy tip. This one I hope is really useful for some for more people than me, which is we were talking about teams before and get ferdi f e r d i getferdi.com, I think is the website. Basically, it’s a chat aggregator. It’s, it’s basically a browser window, but it puts in all of the different chats that you might use. So if you use Microsoft Teams, and if you use Slack, and if you use LinkedIn chat, and if you use Skype, and if you do all these different things. So what it does is you log into your accounts in this one thing, and then it just lines them all up on the side. And you can click on which one you want to see that you’re getting chat messages from. So now, I don’t have to open 20 different tabs. And remember to log in to five different applications and all those things, I can just go open up the 30 app, and it’ll just have a little red button next to the ones where people are having chat communications with me. So if you have way too many chat systems on your computer, get ferdie is a great one, because it’s also open source, it’s up on GitHub. And so there are other versions that like they’re trying to charge quite a bit of money for. And this one’s totally free. So if that is useful for you get to getferdi.com.

Tim Van Norman 22:43
Nice.

Brent Warner 22:47
All right. So switching over, we talked about some of the I mean, they’re all product productivity. But we talked about the Microsoft and the Google stuff. Let’s talk about Canvas, Tim, we got a lot of stuff. And we we warned people at the end of season two, that there’s going to be a bunch of stuff coming in Canvas. So So what do you got?

Tim Van Norman 23:07
Well, and we’re gonna have a lot more coming up very soon, as well. So first of all, something that’s really cool SpeedGrader there’s now a comment library. If you type in comments on the right, you can save those and then you can pull them back up, over and over and over again, from students, for students. So something that other systems have had, but they’ve added this it’s a really nice thing

Brent Warner 23:34
That is nice. Can you put links into those too? like can can people can they link out to resources that might be valuable inside of that?

Tim Van Norman 23:43
You You can in the comments put in a link. But it’s not. It’s not video yet. Okay, can’t use video and audio comments in there.

Brent Warner 23:51
So for things that I often think about is like, I want to have a leave a comment and say, Hey, you know, you’re struggling with your noun clauses. For example, here is a useful page on Khan Academy where you can go review it, right. And if I already had that in there with a link, that’d be awesome. So So it sounds like I can maybe do it that way too

Tim Van Norman 24:13
Yeah, and nothing else, they can copy and paste that code that to their browser. Okay. Worst case, but but I believe the link will be there. The next one I wanted to bring up is there’s a new type of assignment called a student annotation. So this is where you upload bread, you’re an ESL, this would be great for you. Math, I could see this working, you upload something for the students, and then they annotate it. And each one gets their own copy of it to annotate. And so they can say, oh, here this is wrong verb, wrong tense. This is should be the verb that misspelled whatever it is that you want them to annotate. They can do that on the screen on what you have uploaded. So everybody gets the same thing. And they can work on work on that. And it’s, it’s a really neat new way of doing it. And basically it uses speed grader, the same thing you saw in speed grader is now for the students.

Brent Warner 25:13
Okay? Okay. So, so they can so it’s kind of like, like marking up a PDF or something or any any type of document so I can draw directly on top of it. So you could do a, you know, worksheet type of assignments, you could do, you know, maybe something like writing out or drawing out your thought process on on how you understand the concepts we’re talking about. So I could see a lot of different uses for that for sure.

Tim Van Norman 25:42
Yeah, it’s a really cool thing that they’ve added. The next couple, we’re going to talk about our discussions. And the first one here is, it used to be that you could not make the peer reviews happen before the due date, you had to wait until the due date, and then peer reviews and then you had an until date was kind of the way of making it due.

Brent Warner 26:09
Ohhh. Multiple due dates?

Tim Van Norman 26:11
Not multiple due dates kind of pure behind it, they’re getting there. So the peer review date can now be before the due date.

Brent Warner 26:18
Okay? Okay. So if I can say, Hey, you guys need to post your stuff by Friday, you need to respond before Mondays, you need to go look at it over the weekend and respond to two people before Monday’s class. And the due date will still be set as Monday instead of having to go like a Friday warning or whatever that is.

Tim Van Norman 26:36
Well, it was it was Friday due date. And oh, by the way, the until date was then Monday. Yeah. And it just got to be weird that way. So they they made this change. And I think this changes part of their redesign. So they are working on a redesign of discussions, they’ve started to turn some some of these features on, you can have your posts ordered from newest to oldest. There’s some usability enhancements and stuff like that, that they’re doing, they’re rolling them out every three weeks, they’re coming out with some, some enhancements. They allowed us to, to turn them on or not turn them on, okay. And at IVC, we’ve chosen not to turn them on yet, because it’s an on off switch, once you turn it on, you cannot turn it off. And you will get every enhancement they give when they give it before anybody else is troubleshot. So…

Brent Warner 27:36
So you don’t want to wake up on Monday morning and go, how do I fix all these things? And you’re like “I haven’t even seen that yet.”

Tim Van Norman 27:43
Exactly. So we’re not turning it on yet, but not in our whole organization. I’m we’re looking at how to turn this on in such a way that we can test it. So we may be turning it on in different sub accounts or something like that. But it’s, it’s got a lot of potential, we just want to see how Canvas finalizes everything on that. But if you’re listening from another college, this might be something that you have turned on. And we’d love to know your thoughts. How this how it’s going on something like that. Absolutely. New quizzes. There’s a bunch of new changes that are happening. But the one of the big ones that came out over the summer is item banks. So they’re still announcing that new quizzes is going to be that next level, and they’re pushing it.

Brent Warner 28:38
Do you believe that or? I’m suspicious!

Tim Van Norman 28:41
They’re still announcing it, okay,

Brent Warner 28:43
How long have they been announcing this for by the way, two years this point?

Tim Van Norman 28:47
A number of years, Yes. But, but they now have item banks. And if you look at the left navigation in your course, you now see item banks you see outcomes, you see rubrics, you see a number of different things, outcomes, I guess was there before, but you see a number of different things that weren’t there before. And those are automatically showing up. They don’t show up for the students but it’s trying to give you a quicker link into some of these features. So um, but item bank management has really greatly improved new quizzes that had, you know,

Brent Warner 29:20
it needed a revamping for sure. I mean, it’s nice to have the item banks but it’s it was a little sloppy trying to get through and figure out what you’re using. So good.

Tim Van Norman 29:31
So a couple things coming in August, and we don’t know exactly when so I wanted to bring them up. One is an update to new analytics that is supposed to allow you to basically be able to do attendance. Oh. So based on students viewing pages, students, submitting assignments and things like that you can work and have attendance and calculate attendance for a student. That’s pretty were they there this day and stuff like that. I think of things like positive attendance when you’re trying to take that online, this might be a way of making that happen. So that’s Yeah, I’m looking forward to that one. Yeah, that’s not out yet. But that that’s something to pay attention to. And then another cool one is the rich content editor, when you’re using the new rich content editor, which by the way, they’ve gotten rid of the old one, this summer, we’ve been on it for a year, yeah. But in that new rich content editor at the bottom, there’s the accessibility checker. If you look at that, once this release comes out, which is supposed to be approximately the 21st. So just before classes start for us, it’s supposed to do a number next to the accessibility checker. And that’ll tell you how many issues you’ve got, as you’re working all the time. And so it’s it’s kind of a really neat feature that’s just built in. There’s nothing we’re supposed to be able to turn on, or anything like that to just have it work. So that will be nice as you’re building your classes and building pages and quiz questions. And you know, everything else?

Brent Warner 31:13
Yeah. So and IVC. We’ve already offered that with Google Docs through Grackle. Right? There’s, so it’s kind of like the one built into Canvas of a similar type of thing to that.

Tim Van Norman 31:23
Yeah. Everything we’ve had has been something that you needed to click on to run. So we’ve got you do it, we’ve got the accessibility checker, we’ve got a number of different tools that will let you do that. But you have to do it. In this case, it will just show you as you’re working on the page. Oh, all of your images basically don’t have alternate text. And it just has a little number beside that guy.

Brent Warner 31:50
Oh, so so honest question. Do you think Canvas will be checking itself for its light gray on white background? And no, and, and it will it will cycle through on itself and tell tell tattle on canvas that they are not doing a good job of accessibility because of contrast?

Tim Van Norman 32:13
Because they have a high contrast option, They have told us “No” that they’re not going to do that. So… (silence).

Brent Warner 32:22
NEXT! All right, Zoom.

Tim Van Norman 32:27
We can do we can make changes with regard to a theme on that. There we go. So

Brent Warner 32:31
Alright, let’s talk about zoom a bit.

Tim Van Norman 32:35
So one of the features that I have had, a faculty asked me about over and over and over again, and I’ve had to say, No, you can’t do that is can I share my screen into all of my breakout rooms? And now I can say yes, as long as you’ve updated zoom. Okay. Do I understand? At IVC, I have set settings so that you’re at a minimum level of zoom for security reasons. But zoom can come out with at least one if not two updates a week? Oh, yeah. So I’m not going to, I’m not about to have you update every single time they come up with an update. But I encourage you to at least once a week, push zoom and have it update. And if you’re on one of the latest versions, you can share your screen to all the breakout rooms. That is amazing.

Brent Warner 33:29
Yeah, that’s that’s a wonderful, that is a huge thing. making that available because you send out students to groups, and then you say, Hey, remember what I was talking about, or here’s the link inside of the chat, make sure you open that before you go. Just the ability to have the assignment sent to them. And they can just look at it and review the questions that they’re supposed to be talking about. Even that simple level thing is so great. So I am very happy to hear that they made that change because I was much much needed. And you know, honestly, it’s been too long. It took them too long to get that out. So I’m happy it’s here now.

Tim Van Norman 34:06
Absolutely. Well, one of the things I’m less happy about. It’s a good idea. I just hate the fact that every time I open a meeting I get this is called the active apps notifier. And it will notify all participants of any apps that are running. So I have otter turned on in all of my meetings. Well, every meeting I go into comes up and says this meeting is being live streamed Yeah, you have to click on it. And and I know that because I get why they did it. I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m just saying it’s annoying. Yeah.

Brent Warner 34:44
Yeah, it it would be nice if there was just like a little indicator and you could click a button and see what apps are going rather than like a big notification or something. So…

Tim Van Norman 34:53
Yeah, exactly. Or, or even a notifier that. Okay, I’ll accept all of these. Yeah. Everything for the future. Yep, are all of this one. So another really cool feature they’ve turned it on before, they turned it on over basically our spring semester. But automatic subtitles, and I’m talking subtitles, I’m not talking the otter AI transcript that we’ve talked about and, and looked at in the past, this is built into zoom, where you can go into your settings and turn it on. And then every class, every meeting, you can turn you as the host could turn on subtitles. And anybody can look at the subtitles, they can, they can request the subtitles of you, and you can turn it on for them. Meaning participants can basically read that you can allow them to download it if they want. And it’s just showing up at the bottom of the screen. It’s a really neat feature for accessibility. And the fact that even if you don’t have something like we do with otter, it’s built into zoom now,

Brent Warner 36:04
Yeah, that is great.

Tim Van Norman 36:07
Which, Brent, you pointed out a really cool thing about Chrome when I was talking about this before?

Brent Warner 36:13
Yeah, so in the pre show we were talking about there, there’s also a function inside of Chrome for your students, and depending on who needs this, but inside of the, the three dots menu thing, you can go into your settings. And then if you go into privacy and security and advanced, you can turn on a live caption function inside of the accessibility there. And that basically, any audio that comes through your Chrome browser will automatically have transcription, or you know, the AI transcription down there at the bottom. So you know, if that’s a video, it doesn’t just have to be YouTube, right? YouTube comes with a lot of videos already done, or, you know, not necessarily perfect, but they come through. But also, if you’re using a chat feature through your browser, then that chat will come through. So it’s just another way to access is just a little tip there, hint on the side there. But there is a function inside of Chrome for that as well.

Tim Van Norman 37:12
So along those lines, if you’re running a Windows computer, just kind of a side, about two months ago, edge turned into Chrome ish. So edge now has a backer, the back end of edge is called chromium, which is what Chrome is built on. So if you use Chrome apps, many of them will work in edge now. So it would be interesting to checkout I, I had just found out about this, like you said in the pre show. So I’d be curious as to whether this would work in edge as well. Which Yeah, is a neat option. It’s

Brent Warner 37:53
someone go experiment and leave us a note.

Tim Van Norman 37:55
Absolutely, yeah, we’ll take a look. So nonverbal feedback, this, this one I wanted to throw in for fun. If you’re in a meeting, and you go down to reactions, one of the reactions is a coffee cup. And it says I’m away. And it’s just kind of a cool thing. They’re basically they’re trying to add functionality in different ways. I just found out about this, but often I will go into a meeting. I will start a meeting early. And then I’ll step away and come back. So I’ll be putting the IMA way up. What I do that because it’s a neat little reaction, and then you just click on it again to pull it back down. There’s also a ton of in meeting emojis now that are available. They’re all of if you click on reactions, I was looking at it earlier today. And I was just blown away by how many different I mean, even in the first one Smiley’s and people. There’s just page after page after page have different reactions.

Brent Warner 39:05
Yeah, that are available, it seems to be pretty much. I mean, a large amount of the selection there. So before they had like three or four choices you could choose and now it’s Yeah, there’s a ton on there. So I don’t know there might there might not be all of them to tell the truth. I haven’t I haven’t actually gone in and confirmed but it is nice that they have a lot of those reactions, a lot of the options for people to kind of give different types of feedback. I’ve used them and then some, some other other teachers didn’t know that that was a feature yet. And they’re like, why do you have a pizza on your screen? Little things like that. So yeah, it’s nice to have that in there. For sure.

Tim Van Norman 39:43
Absolutely. It’s it can make things more enjoyable to be in those meetings. So focus mode. This one I really want to dig into a little bit more. It’s coming out. It’s out as of August 7 and haven’t really had a chance to play. And that is on that you can set it up as a focus mode. So only the host can see participants videos, or profile pictures, or profile pictures when the video is off. So it basically sets it up so that you don’t have people looking at each other. There, they can focus only on the host. And then there’s a component to it where screen sharing basically as the host, you can see what is on this, you can set it up so that the student can share their screen, but only with you, not with the rest of the students

Brent Warner 40:42
Perfect. So they know they have a problem they want to talk to you about during break, they can show you what’s going on, you don’t necessarily have to go to a private breakout room every time to do it. I like that idea too. So the focus mode is really Hey, your the participants will be now better focused because they don’t, they’re not going to be as distracted by all the other little bells and whistles of zoom. So hey, you guys focus in on what I’m showing you right now everything else gets turned off temporarily. Right? Yeah, I can definitely see that being valuable and useful.

Tim Van Norman 41:17
This next one I want to play with, I haven’t played with it at all yet video feedback directly in the zoom chat. so users can send and receive video files in zoom chat, download and play the video directly in the zoom client. So like I said, I want to play with that a little bit. But apparently you can. You can include inside the chat, you’ve already been able to include documents and other things. But you can do video and the video will play somehow in the zoom client. That’s that’s a part. I’m really curious as to what that means.

Brent Warner 41:50
Yeah. I can see I can already see problems with it for sure.

Tim Van Norman 41:55
problems. Yeah, so the question is, can we have some? It could it could solve, it could do some really cool things. But we’ll have to see.

Brent Warner 42:04
I could see some things. Yeah, interesting.

Tim Van Norman 42:08
Secure share with window filtering. This is a really neat concept. I often when I’m working with somebody on zoom, I ask them to share their whole screen. And I don’t care what’s on your background, because because you’re going to open up a new application, you’re going to do stuff and I don’t want you to have to go back and start sharing over and over and over again. This will actually basically filter out the background. Oh, nice. So your desktop, and so that you can see the you you’re working with somebody and you see just their applications that are running, not whatever they’ve got on the background.

Brent Warner 42:45
So I don’t have to sign up all my whole desktop in order for you to look at the one thing that I’m trying to show to you.

Tim Van Norman 42:50
Well, and, and and when I’m doing a presentation, I always take I’ve got it on my desktop, I literally have a desktop icon, that is a folder, and I take everything on my desktop and I drop it in my desktop folder, dump it into my presentation, and then I pull them all back. Because I don’t want to show what all my applications are or files are that are on my desktop, when I’m presenting, I want to hide them. And this would be a way of just doing that automatically. So I love this concept. Great. Great. And the last one here, improved low light adjustment for backlit environments. One of the things that I’ve seen a lot, edit does not matter your skin tone. I’m very white. And if I made a backlit environment, and I don’t have any light coming on in front of me, I’m the shadow. Okay, that just doesn’t work very well, to see a shadow moving around on the screen. And so this, basically it leaves the lighting behind it available, but it front lights you

Brent Warner 43:56
Okay. Okay.

Tim Van Norman 43:57
So it’s a really neat concept. I’d like to see how this goes. And maybe I’m seeing it and I don’t know it, that would be great. But it’s it’s one of these things where I’m seeing more and more people or I’ve noticed people where they just are in the background and you can’t really see them because of backlighting. Yeah, they’re sitting in front of a window and they don’t they’re sitting, you know, at a desk with a window behind them. And there’s a wall right in front of them. So they got no light in front of them. So I’m going to be curious as to how well that works.

Brent Warner 44:31
Yeah, I’ve seen that quite a few times too. So that’ll be that’ll be a good feature for people who, you know, I mean, a lot of us are we’re just stuck in our the constraints of what our houses are built like or whatever, you know, whatever it is. And so this is the only place where I can really sit and do this work and it’s happened to be in front of a sliding glass window and a big bright sun right up here or something like that. So cool. That seems like a good little feature as well. So we Got a lot of different things going on everybody. You know, these are hard. You know, we mentioned before, it’s hard to keep on top of all of these things. So I just want to read re encourage people to click when you see things that you don’t know what they are. See, see what happens. Play with the different things with zoom for sure. Just try and refresh your, you know, go check inside of the zoom and check for updates. Because really, they do come out. And then they’re like, sometimes, you know, they’re like big features that come out. You’re like, you read the little text on it. It’s like, Oh, you know, this one the Share, share, to share to breakout rooms when I saw that one show up on there. I’m like, What? Because for sure, you know, and this is something that I would implement that day if I’m if I you know, have use for it. And so yeah, lots of different things coming up. Tim, we got a lot of plans for the third season of the show. We’ve gotten really good reaction to episode one already with Dr. Hernandez. And so that was great to do and, and we’re glad where we launched off the season with that one. So let’s move in towards wrapping up.

Tim Van Norman 46:10
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about updates for the fall including Google workspace, Microsoft canvas and zoom. For more information about the show, please visit our website at thehigheredtechpodcast.com. There you will find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner 46:30
As always, we want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast calm and let us know your thoughts. And of course, if you have ideas for future shows, there’s a link over there where you can give us your topic ideas.

Tim Van Norman 46:43
For everyone at IVC. That’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support at extension 5696 or by emailing IVCtech@ivc.edu. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner 47:02
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 47:09
I’m Tim VanNorman,

Brent Warner 47:10
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Have a great semester everybody. Good luck with the first classes