Episode Transcript
Brent Warner 0:00
You may have logged into Zoom recently and seen that it’s had a bit of a spruce up. What do you need to know about what’s new in Zoom these days? We’re discussing it here. This is the HigherEdTech Podcast, Season Eight, Episode Two.
Tim Van Norman 0:26
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Assistant Director of Technology Services at Irvine Valley College, an adjunct professor of business at Cypress College,
Brent Warner 0:37
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 0:44
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us
Brent Warner 0:47
All right, so Tim, we’re a little off schedule. People – regular listeners, might know they’re like, “Wait, what’s going on?” We’re on schedule to be done with the first 10 by the end of the semester if we go every other week from this week on. But we had a little bit of a rough start, and it was a busy semester. I had my birthday, and you know other things are happening, and so don’t worry, everybody. We’re still on track.
Tim Van Norman 1:14
Absolutely, and I had my birthday in there too. So happy birthday! It’s been a little bit since we talked on that.
Brent Warner 1:20
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.
Tim Van Norman 1:21
But yes, some of the some of the fun stuff that’s been going on.
Brent Warner 1:25
Well, Tim, there’s a big one. I noticed your your job title sounds a little bit different.
Tim Van Norman 1:30
Yeah, it’s actually a few characters shorter. Yeah, which is important because I don’t know how the other would have fit on a business card. I’m interested in my new one, but yes, I the day after my birthday, I had my second interview for the full non interim position as assistant director of technology services at Irvine Valley College. Yes, congratulations! So I got that, and that was that was neat. It was a great way to start off the semester and all that.
Brent Warner 2:01
And now rolls on the road a little easier too, right?
Tim Van Norman 2:05
Yeah, interim did did give a little bit of issue in there, but I didn’t realize how much I I actually cared about it.
Brent Warner 2:13
Oh, good!
Tim Van Norman 2:13
You know, I wanted to, and all that stuff. It wasn’t that, but the relief I should say that came when I got it, when it was amazing. So yeah,
Brent Warner 2:24
Good, good, good. Well, congratulations. So that is nice. It’s good for you, good for the school, and so excited to see that kind of go forward. And I know you’ve got a lot of big plans for the position in the next couple of years as well, too.
Tim Van Norman 2:39
So even especially the next couple of months, we’re going to start.
Brent Warner 2:44
I was trying to give you a little bit of breathing room on that to go for it
Tim Van Norman 2:48
I don’t have time. There’s some. There’s a project with Title II that I need to have done really quickly, and so I don’t have time to waste. (Laughter)
Brent Warner 2:57
All right. Well, we’re looking forward to those big changes.
Tim Van Norman 3:00
Absolutely.
Brent Warner 3:01
So today, though, Tim, we’re gonna get into we do this about once a year, right? Zoom updates. You know, Zoom is a platform so many teachers are using. They’re doing you know classes through it. Obviously, we’ve all got meetings and things like that. And just kind of at the end of last semester, maybe in the summer a little bit, I’ve logged in a few times. I’m like, “Oh, wait a second, what’s going on here? Wait, this is moved. This is gone. This is missing, right? Like we’ve all had those little experiences. So there have been some pretty significant changes to Zoom. A lot of it feels, and we’re not going to talk about all of the all of the changes because some of them are like enterprise level or business level stuff and all those things. It really feels to me like Zoom is making these major. I mean, the AI stuff, of course, right? Like the AI integration stuff is going to be all inside of there, which I guess I would suggest be a little bit careful about and pay attention to. But also, you know, some of this stuff is just a little bit more basic features that are nice to know about, and so let’s get into some of these things, Tim. And I think you’ve got some thoughts on these. We got too many to talk about, so we’ll go as quickly as we can. But let’s see what we got.
Tim Van Norman 4:13
Absolutely. So one of the things that I found really interesting is whiteboards. Now, if you use Zoom whiteboards, and honestly, I don’t use them very often. But you can actually save them into a gallery, so that you can use them later. You can give them to people and stuff like that. So, the concept of being able to use a whiteboard, reuse whiteboards, and continue to use whiteboards, not just in that one meeting, that’s actually pretty cool.
Brent Warner 4:42
Well, it’s great for teachers, right? Because that’s like all of your board work, essentially. And so, I struggle with it too because the whiteboards, you know, if they’re just not smooth to draw on with the mouse, they never have been. And so, the teachers I know who have like a wack. Tablet or one of those things, they’re like they take they take great advantage of them, and they you know like they they really have set themselves up to be fully integrated and have a system going with them. But of course, to be able to give that to your back to your students, or to be able to integrate it, or to even just be able to scan it and put it into AI, and then get some more uses out of that, you know, in that way, I think there’s a lot of really interesting things that can be done with that.
Tim Van Norman 5:24
And remember, you don’t have to just draw; you can also do things like type and circle or something like that. You know, point to things. So there’s a lot of usefulness in the whiteboards, but definitely something that’s more for a live meeting than something that you would use for recording or something like that. I would say.
Brent Warner 5:45
Yeah. So next, we’ll just we’re going to talk about this briefly, Tim. We might do another full episode on this later on after get some chance to do some exploration, but we haven’t talked about Zoom apps, right? Like the integrated apps that are built right into Zoom. You know, I use the timer, you know a lot when we do our recordings. We put the timer up so we kind of know where we’re at. But I haven’t installed many L other apps, but just to let people know, there’s a few things out there that are integrated. There’s a Kahoot app in there now, so you can actually play Kahoot directly inside of Zoom, I think it connects to your account, and so instead of you know just screen sharing your browser, you can have it integrated directly in. I’m not sure what features are in in inside of there. I’d have to play with a little bit more, but that’s kind of cool that it’s just right there. And then the other one I saw that’s probably pretty useful for teachers is there’s an attendance taker app as well, so I think that, and again, haven’t looked at it totally. I just saw that it was there. I was like, it’s one of the featured ones, and it said, you know, that could be either that students who are logged in could either check themselves in, or maybe if they’re using, I don’t know, maybe if they’re using like a authorized account, it automatically counts them as being in. I’m not sure, but we’ll we’ll look at those later.
Tim Van Norman 7:03
Well, and along with that attendance taker, just built into Zoom, if you have invited your students into the Zoom meeting, it will give you a list of who’s there and who’s not there. Yeah, directly in the meeting, and that that often I’m like, well, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But for taking attendance, that would be amazing. Yeah, because you could literally at a glance see who’s not there, and and don’t have to run a separate report or something like that.
Brent Warner 7:31
Yeah, if only you could link into to Canvas or something right there. That’d be great. That would prayers for the future. Okay, so this one is one. You know, every time I see these ones, like just my my job as a teaching English language learners gets a little bit like, oh, what’s going on here? But we should should notice that there is a voice translator service now built into Zoom, and I’ll read you their like language, their copy here. It said, “Voice translator during meetings is designed to enable real-time language interpretation, focusing on live multilingual meetings, and aims to remove the language barriers in live conversations and enable teams to connect and collaborate more efficient or effectively. So, essentially, translation live on the fly as it goes, and then the languages that are currently supported for that are English, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish. And so, for me, I’m like, you know, like for my classes, I don’t really want my students to have access to that. For other other classes, other purposes, you know, there might be times for sure. It’s an interesting set of options, definitely valuable for the right groups and problematic for other groups, I guess.
Tim Van Norman 8:54
And we saw that there are settings that can force it to to be in English or something like that as well. So I’m assuming that means it will not do the translation. I think of English as a second language. You know, you want them to hear the English. You don’t want them to hear Chinese. Not going to help them learn. Same thing with if you’re taking Chinese, Japanese, French. All of those that would make a huge difference if you’re hearing it in English instead. Chances are you’re not going to be able to, in your brain, translate it into the other language.
Brent Warner 9:32
That’s right. Yeah. So the irony, of course, is that these languages are the exact languages that we teach at IBC. Like, there’s no there’s no extra beyond well sorry we do have ASL right um and so uh but I was laughing here just looking at this I’m like oh that’s our department’s right there so um okay so something to be aware of that is there and yes you are right you can control it a little bit in the in the host tools so don’t worry. If you are teaching a language that your students are just necessarily by default just going to be able to click something right in the meeting and translate everything, but so Tib, we we kind of looked at some of these issues here that are like the the user experience just straight in Zoom that we’re normally working with, right? There’s lots of other things going on as we mentioned, but let’s just talk about some of these things. So, Tim, did you notice that the toolbar is a little bit easier to use? Maybe a bit simplified.
Tim Van Norman 10:30
It’s simplified, but it doesn’t have the things that I want. So, so there’s actually there’s a good thing because you can now go into the host tools, and then drag out the icons from there.
Brent Warner 10:45
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 10:46
So if you’re if whatever your screen’s not wide enough to have all the icons or whatever it is, you can pick and choose what’s on your on that taskbar. That is that’s really amazing. That’s really useful.
Brent Warner 10:58
Yeah, because there are some for sure where it’s like I use this, but I don’t think other people use it, and so I want to be able to have that right away. And that includes like that, as we’re just talking about the translation, the captions option too, right? So I know that a lot of people, yeah, the record, right? A lot of people have, you know, like struggle with hearing, or it’s hard to make out what’s going on, and so like a caption underlines. You and I have talked about that in the past. Is I think both of us keep captions on our regular TV shows and streaming services. So, so yeah. So you can play with, you can customize that a lot more, and then also the host controls are a little bit more consolidated as well, Tim. Did you notice that?
Tim Van Norman 11:42
Yes, yeah. It’s one button, and down on the lower right-hand side, and it comes up, and it just gives you a ton of different options, all in one place, instead of having to go to the top for some things, the bottom for other things, in different, you know, showing up in multiple toolbars. It’s now in one place, which has been a really neat addition to that.
Brent Warner 12:05
Yeah, for sure. So very useful. Another one that came in here. I this is funny because you know we have to be in meetings, and sometimes in Zoom, sometimes in Microsoft Teams, sometimes in this and that. And so this one, I I am looking at. I’m like a little surprised that this has taken a while to get here. But single tab screen sharing, so where you just share a single tab that’s open on your browser instead of sharing the whole browser. And so there are times when you want one, and times when you don’t want. You know, like you want the whole browser because sometimes you want to go like, hey, I’m going to be moving through multiple tabs and showing different people different things as we’re going, and then there are other times like maybe when your grade book is open or you know something like that. Then it’s like, oh yeah, actually you don’t want to accidentally open up another tab where something’s in the background that we don’t want our students to see. You know, it could be like your answer keys or your lesson plans or whatever else you got going on in your different tabs, and so apparently this is a new feature here. Although it’s been like it’s been kind of a default, I think, in Teams for a long time, right?
Tim Van Norman 13:14
Honestly, I don’t share my screen much in Teams, and frankly, frankly, I have multiple screens, and so I always clear one of my screens and I share that one. Oh yeah, yeah. Because I’m there’s always something going on and somebody oh can I get this information out of a spreadsheet? And it’s easier to not have to stop share, start share, or or switch on a share. And so I just do the screen, but it has been it save this would save me from often I’m sitting there and I’ve got 12 tabs up.
Brent Warner 13:46
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 13:47
I don’t want people to see what my other tabs are. (laughter) This is this is one. Just do that. So absolutely, this would be a nice a nice one to use.
Brent Warner 13:57
Well, it’s funny, Tim, that you mentioned that like that’s how you set up your workflow and like part of it, part of the way that we set up our workflows are based on what’s available to us, right? And so it’s like, okay, is that the same way I would have always done it if I had this before? If I didn’t, you know, maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s worth considering just for everyone listening out there to go like, okay, actually, my workflow works best this way, and now I have a little bit more of an option to customize it or completely ignore it. Of course, you can do that as well.
Tim Van Norman 14:25
Well, and I often am presenting at work where I have multiple screens. If I was at home, I’d only have one.
Brent Warner 14:34
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 14:35
So even knowing those and being able to make the quick adjustment so that work from home isn’t a pain, or I don’t have to bring three three screens home with me in order to work from home, you know. So it’s good to know what’s going on in all of these cases.
Brent Warner 14:51
Yeah, nice. Okay, a couple other interactive tools. Should we move into some of those, Tim?
Tim Van Norman 14:57
Absolutely. You. Mentioned or we talked earlier about the whiteboards, but dynamic gallery view-you can see, you can resize participants. This is something that has annoyed me about Teams, and now Zoom has the capability of doing it as well, where basically you can split somebody’s face in half by because it puts people together so that it fits everybody on one screen. I don’t know. It’s not something that I’ve liked. I like the fact that I can see you in Zoom, but it is something that people have gotten used to with Teams and Zoom. Also, by the way, will focus on you and put your your face in the middle. Yeah, automatically. Yeah, yeah, and and so that can help in all of these situations when you’ve got a gallery and stuff like that. A lot less chance of splitting somebody’s face and seeing only half.
Brent Warner 16:01
Yeah, yeah.
Tim Van Norman 16:03
But it is nice to have that pop out. You can pop it out of a meeting if it’s a full screen for you. You can pop that out and put it on a different screen for you, whether you’re presenting or whether you’re the a participant.
Brent Warner 16:17
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 16:17
So now you can actually see what the person is sharing and have a full gallery on another screen if you happen to have two screens. That is incredibly useful.
Brent Warner 16:26
That is useful for sure. Actually, Tim, can we go back to the whiteboards because there’s another part to this that that I think we skipped and that that is worth worth knowing about, which is that you can now click a button and you can push out a like a blank version of a pre-designed whiteboard. So essentially, it’s the same thing as like making a worksheet, right? That you can then give to all of your students at once, and then as the teacher, you can actually go in and see what their each student is working on. So like you can click on it; it’ll zoom in on that student doing that work on their whiteboard, and everyone has their own different version of it, and then you can go in and annotate on it as they’re working on it as well. So this is, you know, like we do this with Google Docs all the time, right? Like, but now it’s like in a Zoom meeting on, you know, these Zoom documents that are right there, and so all the work that it would take to do that with a Google Doc, it would be very very complicated in terms of like integrating it into a Zoom meeting. But here it’s just now it’s just a click click of a button, and you can have students working on things. And so you know again, depending on your classes, like that could be like do some quick worksheet activities, one or two problems, see how you’re doing with this. I’ll be jumping around and looking at your work. Right. There’s a lot of really cool, valuable ways for teacher-student interaction in a feature like that. The concept is not totally new, and like ed tech companies have been trying to do these kinds of things for a long time. But I think in a platform like this, it really want you know if it’s smooth, then it can be really really valuable.
Tim Van Norman 18:05
Absolutely, yeah, that could be very useful in a lot of different ways.
Brent Warner 18:10
Yeah, so take a look at that. It is worth worth kind of understanding and seeing what’s going on. There are some other things going on, Tim, in terms of like the you know desktop app and like you know some things like that, but I think for the most part I would encourage people to go in and look around. But I want to talk for a couple more minutes before we wrap the show today, just about the AI integrations that are built right into to Team or sorry Team into Zoom. So Tim, you know a little bit more. You’ve been playing with these more. So what are the AI integrations now?
Tim Van Norman 18:44
So some of the cool things about the AI companion, you can have it work without recording. It technically it does kind of record what you’re doing, but it would just come out with a summary at the end or something like that. A recap, something like that. Couple things to be aware of. Make sure you check your settings, and the reason I say that is because you can. Zoom is assuming that you want settings set a certain way, and so logging into the into Zoom US with your account and just verifying your meeting settings is really important. For instance, there’s a setting that says send a Zoom recap only to the host. Send the Zoom recap to the host and co-hosts send the Zoom recap to all people who are associated or who were invited to the meeting. Send to anybody invited to the meeting that is from your domain. You know, all all kinds of different settings. Do you want to even start it automatically? All kinds of different settings. You need to be aware and be comfortable with what you want to do. Myself, I love the idea of sending it to me, and then I can make the choice on what I send out because I love the recaps. I’ve been going through them and stuff like that, but I, in every single recap, I have found errors.
Brent Warner 20:21
What kind of errors?
Tim Van Norman 20:23
So first of all, when you’ve got five people sitting in a room, only one person is talking the whole time. So you know, Tim Van Norman has said what five different people have said, which I understand that. But it’s you know sometimes it’s nicer than take the names out before you send it off, but also I also often find that next steps, or or what follow up activities, we might have actually covered that in the meeting. Especially if you start off with, okay, this is what we’re going to do in this meeting. Often the the AI companion will include those as the next steps for after the meeting. So you’ve already done it. Clean that. Clean that up. And sometimes there’s just somebody said something that it took a wrong direction, and it comes out and it says, you know, Brent Warner said something, and it’s like those weren’t even close to the words or meaning that he said. And so you just always want to verify it so that the people who did not attend the meeting don’t get bad information.
Brent Warner 21:35
Yeah, and then those settings on who can get it. So you know, we were kind of joking about this, you know pre-show, but it’s like you know someone doesn’t show up again, and you’re like someone’s flustered with it, and they’re like that Tim never coming to the meetings, right? And then and then Tim gets the email about him never coming to the meetings, right? Like you know, it’s like we know these things happen, but also it’s like you know just we don’t need to expose every failure of you know humanity inside of these these moments, you know. There’s no reason to make people feel bad if we’re you know something happens on the back end of something, right? So that’s one part. But the other thing too, Tim, is there is a feature inside of the AI now, which is like a it’s a chat, it’s an AI chat that where you can chat about what’s happened so far in the meeting. So if you log in late to a meeting, for example, you can just say, “Hey, catch me up, and it will give you a brief summary on you know what you’ve what you missed. So if you’re, oh hey, I’m going to be to the meeting 15 minutes late, just you know like go ahead and start without me. I’ll I’ll catch myself up, but now you actually can catch yourself up without interrupting the meeting, right?
Tim Van Norman 22:45
Yeah, it’s simply at the top. You click on the little icon and say “Ask AI Companion.
Brent Warner 22:51
Yeah, and so I think it’s pretty cool. Like that’s that’s a useful feature. Like it’s useful for students. I you know there’s also little things like you know we’ve had moments where it’s like oh you know I might ask you to present something like oh Tim can you present something for me like I’m not ready for it and then you’re like oh yeah but I wasn’t really paying attention I was answering an email when they were talking what did I just miss what did they talk about the last I mean that would never happen in the highly efficient and professional world that you and I work in, but possibly for someone else. So you know, it’s just it’s nice to be able to just jump back and forth and kind of catch up without interfering or interrupting everybody else’s work as they’re going through the meetings or the class schedule or whatever else it is,
Tim Van Norman 23:43
Absolutely. And in the end, it’s about making the meetings better.
Brent Warner 23:47
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 23:48
And even when I’ve been in the meeting and I’m paying attention, sometimes I miss something. Kind of nice to just be able to go. Wait, did anybody talk about this before I bring it up? Because you know, it’s an hour and a half into a meeting, I can’t remember every topic that we’ve covered so far.
Brent Warner 24:05
Yeah, and for students too, they could be like, “Hey, you know, teachers talking about this, but I don’t know what that means. Like, what am I? What am I missing here? Right, and so you know, even things like that, like, are hugely valuable. And I’ve seen it in the past. Like, students get lost on one thing early on, and then the whole classes is a wash for them, right? Like they get they’re getting nothing out of it until they get that one core concept, and so so lots of cool little things to play with inside of there. You know, there are features that are worth exploring. Tim, you there there is a link specifically to all the new things at Zoom, I know that you had found that.
Tim Van Norman 24:46
Yeah, that’s here. It’s actually zoom.com/en/products/what-new’s. So what’s w h a t s. New, and that that’s kind of an evergreen thing. They just update it every month, with what’s new, and it’s pretty useful to go back through and see what is new. What are they making changes to? There’s a lot of stuff on the Zoom phone. There’s a lot of stuff on Zoom. Is really coming out with all kinds of different integrations,
Brent Warner 25:22
Yeah, lots, lots and lots and lots of features, and so you know, just every once in a while, do a scan through it, see what’s valuable to you. If like me, when I was reading through some of it, I’m like, I do not know what any of that means, and then Tim, you kind of clarified you’re like, oh, well, that’s for like customer support purposes that are totally separate from. So you know you have to kind of pick and choose and figure out what works for your your needs or not. But you know it’s all there for you, and so we do recommend just help you keep on top of some of these changes. You know, even just knowing one or two of them can sometimes make your life a lot easier. So worth worth a couple of minutes of exploration every once in a while.
Tim Van Norman 26:02
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website@thehigheredtechpodcast.com.
Brent Warner 26:13
As always, we do want your feedback, so please go to thehigheredtechpodcast.com and let us know your thoughts.
Tim Van Norman 26:20
For everyone at IVC that’s listening, if you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. You got questions about technology in your classroom? Please contact me, Tim Van Norman, at tvan Norman at ivc.edu.
Brent Warner 26:33
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.
Tim Van Norman 26:38
I’m Tim Van Norman,
Brent Warner 26:40
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care, everybody.
You may have logged into Zoom recently and seen that it’s had a bit of a spruce up. What do you need to know about what’s new in Zoom these days? We’re discussing it here. This is the HigherEdTech Podcast, Season Eight, Episode Two.
Tim Van Norman 0:26
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Assistant Director of Technology Services at Irvine Valley College, an adjunct professor of business at Cypress College,
Brent Warner 0:37
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 0:44
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us
Brent Warner 0:47
All right, so Tim, we’re a little off schedule. People – regular listeners, might know they’re like, “Wait, what’s going on?” We’re on schedule to be done with the first 10 by the end of the semester if we go every other week from this week on. But we had a little bit of a rough start, and it was a busy semester. I had my birthday, and you know other things are happening, and so don’t worry, everybody. We’re still on track.
Tim Van Norman 1:14
Absolutely, and I had my birthday in there too. So happy birthday! It’s been a little bit since we talked on that.
Brent Warner 1:20
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.
Tim Van Norman 1:21
But yes, some of the some of the fun stuff that’s been going on.
Brent Warner 1:25
Well, Tim, there’s a big one. I noticed your your job title sounds a little bit different.
Tim Van Norman 1:30
Yeah, it’s actually a few characters shorter. Yeah, which is important because I don’t know how the other would have fit on a business card. I’m interested in my new one, but yes, I the day after my birthday, I had my second interview for the full non interim position as assistant director of technology services at Irvine Valley College. Yes, congratulations! So I got that, and that was that was neat. It was a great way to start off the semester and all that.
Brent Warner 2:01
And now rolls on the road a little easier too, right?
Tim Van Norman 2:05
Yeah, interim did did give a little bit of issue in there, but I didn’t realize how much I I actually cared about it.
Brent Warner 2:13
Oh, good!
Tim Van Norman 2:13
You know, I wanted to, and all that stuff. It wasn’t that, but the relief I should say that came when I got it, when it was amazing. So yeah,
Brent Warner 2:24
Good, good, good. Well, congratulations. So that is nice. It’s good for you, good for the school, and so excited to see that kind of go forward. And I know you’ve got a lot of big plans for the position in the next couple of years as well, too.
Tim Van Norman 2:39
So even especially the next couple of months, we’re going to start.
Brent Warner 2:44
I was trying to give you a little bit of breathing room on that to go for it
Tim Van Norman 2:48
I don’t have time. There’s some. There’s a project with Title II that I need to have done really quickly, and so I don’t have time to waste. (Laughter)
Brent Warner 2:57
All right. Well, we’re looking forward to those big changes.
Tim Van Norman 3:00
Absolutely.
Brent Warner 3:01
So today, though, Tim, we’re gonna get into we do this about once a year, right? Zoom updates. You know, Zoom is a platform so many teachers are using. They’re doing you know classes through it. Obviously, we’ve all got meetings and things like that. And just kind of at the end of last semester, maybe in the summer a little bit, I’ve logged in a few times. I’m like, “Oh, wait a second, what’s going on here? Wait, this is moved. This is gone. This is missing, right? Like we’ve all had those little experiences. So there have been some pretty significant changes to Zoom. A lot of it feels, and we’re not going to talk about all of the all of the changes because some of them are like enterprise level or business level stuff and all those things. It really feels to me like Zoom is making these major. I mean, the AI stuff, of course, right? Like the AI integration stuff is going to be all inside of there, which I guess I would suggest be a little bit careful about and pay attention to. But also, you know, some of this stuff is just a little bit more basic features that are nice to know about, and so let’s get into some of these things, Tim. And I think you’ve got some thoughts on these. We got too many to talk about, so we’ll go as quickly as we can. But let’s see what we got.
Tim Van Norman 4:13
Absolutely. So one of the things that I found really interesting is whiteboards. Now, if you use Zoom whiteboards, and honestly, I don’t use them very often. But you can actually save them into a gallery, so that you can use them later. You can give them to people and stuff like that. So, the concept of being able to use a whiteboard, reuse whiteboards, and continue to use whiteboards, not just in that one meeting, that’s actually pretty cool.
Brent Warner 4:42
Well, it’s great for teachers, right? Because that’s like all of your board work, essentially. And so, I struggle with it too because the whiteboards, you know, if they’re just not smooth to draw on with the mouse, they never have been. And so, the teachers I know who have like a wack. Tablet or one of those things, they’re like they take they take great advantage of them, and they you know like they they really have set themselves up to be fully integrated and have a system going with them. But of course, to be able to give that to your back to your students, or to be able to integrate it, or to even just be able to scan it and put it into AI, and then get some more uses out of that, you know, in that way, I think there’s a lot of really interesting things that can be done with that.
Tim Van Norman 5:24
And remember, you don’t have to just draw; you can also do things like type and circle or something like that. You know, point to things. So there’s a lot of usefulness in the whiteboards, but definitely something that’s more for a live meeting than something that you would use for recording or something like that. I would say.
Brent Warner 5:45
Yeah. So next, we’ll just we’re going to talk about this briefly, Tim. We might do another full episode on this later on after get some chance to do some exploration, but we haven’t talked about Zoom apps, right? Like the integrated apps that are built right into Zoom. You know, I use the timer, you know a lot when we do our recordings. We put the timer up so we kind of know where we’re at. But I haven’t installed many L other apps, but just to let people know, there’s a few things out there that are integrated. There’s a Kahoot app in there now, so you can actually play Kahoot directly inside of Zoom, I think it connects to your account, and so instead of you know just screen sharing your browser, you can have it integrated directly in. I’m not sure what features are in in inside of there. I’d have to play with a little bit more, but that’s kind of cool that it’s just right there. And then the other one I saw that’s probably pretty useful for teachers is there’s an attendance taker app as well, so I think that, and again, haven’t looked at it totally. I just saw that it was there. I was like, it’s one of the featured ones, and it said, you know, that could be either that students who are logged in could either check themselves in, or maybe if they’re using, I don’t know, maybe if they’re using like a authorized account, it automatically counts them as being in. I’m not sure, but we’ll we’ll look at those later.
Tim Van Norman 7:03
Well, and along with that attendance taker, just built into Zoom, if you have invited your students into the Zoom meeting, it will give you a list of who’s there and who’s not there. Yeah, directly in the meeting, and that that often I’m like, well, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But for taking attendance, that would be amazing. Yeah, because you could literally at a glance see who’s not there, and and don’t have to run a separate report or something like that.
Brent Warner 7:31
Yeah, if only you could link into to Canvas or something right there. That’d be great. That would prayers for the future. Okay, so this one is one. You know, every time I see these ones, like just my my job as a teaching English language learners gets a little bit like, oh, what’s going on here? But we should should notice that there is a voice translator service now built into Zoom, and I’ll read you their like language, their copy here. It said, “Voice translator during meetings is designed to enable real-time language interpretation, focusing on live multilingual meetings, and aims to remove the language barriers in live conversations and enable teams to connect and collaborate more efficient or effectively. So, essentially, translation live on the fly as it goes, and then the languages that are currently supported for that are English, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish. And so, for me, I’m like, you know, like for my classes, I don’t really want my students to have access to that. For other other classes, other purposes, you know, there might be times for sure. It’s an interesting set of options, definitely valuable for the right groups and problematic for other groups, I guess.
Tim Van Norman 8:54
And we saw that there are settings that can force it to to be in English or something like that as well. So I’m assuming that means it will not do the translation. I think of English as a second language. You know, you want them to hear the English. You don’t want them to hear Chinese. Not going to help them learn. Same thing with if you’re taking Chinese, Japanese, French. All of those that would make a huge difference if you’re hearing it in English instead. Chances are you’re not going to be able to, in your brain, translate it into the other language.
Brent Warner 9:32
That’s right. Yeah. So the irony, of course, is that these languages are the exact languages that we teach at IBC. Like, there’s no there’s no extra beyond well sorry we do have ASL right um and so uh but I was laughing here just looking at this I’m like oh that’s our department’s right there so um okay so something to be aware of that is there and yes you are right you can control it a little bit in the in the host tools so don’t worry. If you are teaching a language that your students are just necessarily by default just going to be able to click something right in the meeting and translate everything, but so Tib, we we kind of looked at some of these issues here that are like the the user experience just straight in Zoom that we’re normally working with, right? There’s lots of other things going on as we mentioned, but let’s just talk about some of these things. So, Tim, did you notice that the toolbar is a little bit easier to use? Maybe a bit simplified.
Tim Van Norman 10:30
It’s simplified, but it doesn’t have the things that I want. So, so there’s actually there’s a good thing because you can now go into the host tools, and then drag out the icons from there.
Brent Warner 10:45
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 10:46
So if you’re if whatever your screen’s not wide enough to have all the icons or whatever it is, you can pick and choose what’s on your on that taskbar. That is that’s really amazing. That’s really useful.
Brent Warner 10:58
Yeah, because there are some for sure where it’s like I use this, but I don’t think other people use it, and so I want to be able to have that right away. And that includes like that, as we’re just talking about the translation, the captions option too, right? So I know that a lot of people, yeah, the record, right? A lot of people have, you know, like struggle with hearing, or it’s hard to make out what’s going on, and so like a caption underlines. You and I have talked about that in the past. Is I think both of us keep captions on our regular TV shows and streaming services. So, so yeah. So you can play with, you can customize that a lot more, and then also the host controls are a little bit more consolidated as well, Tim. Did you notice that?
Tim Van Norman 11:42
Yes, yeah. It’s one button, and down on the lower right-hand side, and it comes up, and it just gives you a ton of different options, all in one place, instead of having to go to the top for some things, the bottom for other things, in different, you know, showing up in multiple toolbars. It’s now in one place, which has been a really neat addition to that.
Brent Warner 12:05
Yeah, for sure. So very useful. Another one that came in here. I this is funny because you know we have to be in meetings, and sometimes in Zoom, sometimes in Microsoft Teams, sometimes in this and that. And so this one, I I am looking at. I’m like a little surprised that this has taken a while to get here. But single tab screen sharing, so where you just share a single tab that’s open on your browser instead of sharing the whole browser. And so there are times when you want one, and times when you don’t want. You know, like you want the whole browser because sometimes you want to go like, hey, I’m going to be moving through multiple tabs and showing different people different things as we’re going, and then there are other times like maybe when your grade book is open or you know something like that. Then it’s like, oh yeah, actually you don’t want to accidentally open up another tab where something’s in the background that we don’t want our students to see. You know, it could be like your answer keys or your lesson plans or whatever else you got going on in your different tabs, and so apparently this is a new feature here. Although it’s been like it’s been kind of a default, I think, in Teams for a long time, right?
Tim Van Norman 13:14
Honestly, I don’t share my screen much in Teams, and frankly, frankly, I have multiple screens, and so I always clear one of my screens and I share that one. Oh yeah, yeah. Because I’m there’s always something going on and somebody oh can I get this information out of a spreadsheet? And it’s easier to not have to stop share, start share, or or switch on a share. And so I just do the screen, but it has been it save this would save me from often I’m sitting there and I’ve got 12 tabs up.
Brent Warner 13:46
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 13:47
I don’t want people to see what my other tabs are. (laughter) This is this is one. Just do that. So absolutely, this would be a nice a nice one to use.
Brent Warner 13:57
Well, it’s funny, Tim, that you mentioned that like that’s how you set up your workflow and like part of it, part of the way that we set up our workflows are based on what’s available to us, right? And so it’s like, okay, is that the same way I would have always done it if I had this before? If I didn’t, you know, maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s worth considering just for everyone listening out there to go like, okay, actually, my workflow works best this way, and now I have a little bit more of an option to customize it or completely ignore it. Of course, you can do that as well.
Tim Van Norman 14:25
Well, and I often am presenting at work where I have multiple screens. If I was at home, I’d only have one.
Brent Warner 14:34
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 14:35
So even knowing those and being able to make the quick adjustment so that work from home isn’t a pain, or I don’t have to bring three three screens home with me in order to work from home, you know. So it’s good to know what’s going on in all of these cases.
Brent Warner 14:51
Yeah, nice. Okay, a couple other interactive tools. Should we move into some of those, Tim?
Tim Van Norman 14:57
Absolutely. You. Mentioned or we talked earlier about the whiteboards, but dynamic gallery view-you can see, you can resize participants. This is something that has annoyed me about Teams, and now Zoom has the capability of doing it as well, where basically you can split somebody’s face in half by because it puts people together so that it fits everybody on one screen. I don’t know. It’s not something that I’ve liked. I like the fact that I can see you in Zoom, but it is something that people have gotten used to with Teams and Zoom. Also, by the way, will focus on you and put your your face in the middle. Yeah, automatically. Yeah, yeah, and and so that can help in all of these situations when you’ve got a gallery and stuff like that. A lot less chance of splitting somebody’s face and seeing only half.
Brent Warner 16:01
Yeah, yeah.
Tim Van Norman 16:03
But it is nice to have that pop out. You can pop it out of a meeting if it’s a full screen for you. You can pop that out and put it on a different screen for you, whether you’re presenting or whether you’re the a participant.
Brent Warner 16:17
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 16:17
So now you can actually see what the person is sharing and have a full gallery on another screen if you happen to have two screens. That is incredibly useful.
Brent Warner 16:26
That is useful for sure. Actually, Tim, can we go back to the whiteboards because there’s another part to this that that I think we skipped and that that is worth worth knowing about, which is that you can now click a button and you can push out a like a blank version of a pre-designed whiteboard. So essentially, it’s the same thing as like making a worksheet, right? That you can then give to all of your students at once, and then as the teacher, you can actually go in and see what their each student is working on. So like you can click on it; it’ll zoom in on that student doing that work on their whiteboard, and everyone has their own different version of it, and then you can go in and annotate on it as they’re working on it as well. So this is, you know, like we do this with Google Docs all the time, right? Like, but now it’s like in a Zoom meeting on, you know, these Zoom documents that are right there, and so all the work that it would take to do that with a Google Doc, it would be very very complicated in terms of like integrating it into a Zoom meeting. But here it’s just now it’s just a click click of a button, and you can have students working on things. And so you know again, depending on your classes, like that could be like do some quick worksheet activities, one or two problems, see how you’re doing with this. I’ll be jumping around and looking at your work. Right. There’s a lot of really cool, valuable ways for teacher-student interaction in a feature like that. The concept is not totally new, and like ed tech companies have been trying to do these kinds of things for a long time. But I think in a platform like this, it really want you know if it’s smooth, then it can be really really valuable.
Tim Van Norman 18:05
Absolutely, yeah, that could be very useful in a lot of different ways.
Brent Warner 18:10
Yeah, so take a look at that. It is worth worth kind of understanding and seeing what’s going on. There are some other things going on, Tim, in terms of like the you know desktop app and like you know some things like that, but I think for the most part I would encourage people to go in and look around. But I want to talk for a couple more minutes before we wrap the show today, just about the AI integrations that are built right into to Team or sorry Team into Zoom. So Tim, you know a little bit more. You’ve been playing with these more. So what are the AI integrations now?
Tim Van Norman 18:44
So some of the cool things about the AI companion, you can have it work without recording. It technically it does kind of record what you’re doing, but it would just come out with a summary at the end or something like that. A recap, something like that. Couple things to be aware of. Make sure you check your settings, and the reason I say that is because you can. Zoom is assuming that you want settings set a certain way, and so logging into the into Zoom US with your account and just verifying your meeting settings is really important. For instance, there’s a setting that says send a Zoom recap only to the host. Send the Zoom recap to the host and co-hosts send the Zoom recap to all people who are associated or who were invited to the meeting. Send to anybody invited to the meeting that is from your domain. You know, all all kinds of different settings. Do you want to even start it automatically? All kinds of different settings. You need to be aware and be comfortable with what you want to do. Myself, I love the idea of sending it to me, and then I can make the choice on what I send out because I love the recaps. I’ve been going through them and stuff like that, but I, in every single recap, I have found errors.
Brent Warner 20:21
What kind of errors?
Tim Van Norman 20:23
So first of all, when you’ve got five people sitting in a room, only one person is talking the whole time. So you know, Tim Van Norman has said what five different people have said, which I understand that. But it’s you know sometimes it’s nicer than take the names out before you send it off, but also I also often find that next steps, or or what follow up activities, we might have actually covered that in the meeting. Especially if you start off with, okay, this is what we’re going to do in this meeting. Often the the AI companion will include those as the next steps for after the meeting. So you’ve already done it. Clean that. Clean that up. And sometimes there’s just somebody said something that it took a wrong direction, and it comes out and it says, you know, Brent Warner said something, and it’s like those weren’t even close to the words or meaning that he said. And so you just always want to verify it so that the people who did not attend the meeting don’t get bad information.
Brent Warner 21:35
Yeah, and then those settings on who can get it. So you know, we were kind of joking about this, you know pre-show, but it’s like you know someone doesn’t show up again, and you’re like someone’s flustered with it, and they’re like that Tim never coming to the meetings, right? And then and then Tim gets the email about him never coming to the meetings, right? Like you know, it’s like we know these things happen, but also it’s like you know just we don’t need to expose every failure of you know humanity inside of these these moments, you know. There’s no reason to make people feel bad if we’re you know something happens on the back end of something, right? So that’s one part. But the other thing too, Tim, is there is a feature inside of the AI now, which is like a it’s a chat, it’s an AI chat that where you can chat about what’s happened so far in the meeting. So if you log in late to a meeting, for example, you can just say, “Hey, catch me up, and it will give you a brief summary on you know what you’ve what you missed. So if you’re, oh hey, I’m going to be to the meeting 15 minutes late, just you know like go ahead and start without me. I’ll I’ll catch myself up, but now you actually can catch yourself up without interrupting the meeting, right?
Tim Van Norman 22:45
Yeah, it’s simply at the top. You click on the little icon and say “Ask AI Companion.
Brent Warner 22:51
Yeah, and so I think it’s pretty cool. Like that’s that’s a useful feature. Like it’s useful for students. I you know there’s also little things like you know we’ve had moments where it’s like oh you know I might ask you to present something like oh Tim can you present something for me like I’m not ready for it and then you’re like oh yeah but I wasn’t really paying attention I was answering an email when they were talking what did I just miss what did they talk about the last I mean that would never happen in the highly efficient and professional world that you and I work in, but possibly for someone else. So you know, it’s just it’s nice to be able to just jump back and forth and kind of catch up without interfering or interrupting everybody else’s work as they’re going through the meetings or the class schedule or whatever else it is,
Tim Van Norman 23:43
Absolutely. And in the end, it’s about making the meetings better.
Brent Warner 23:47
Yeah.
Tim Van Norman 23:48
And even when I’ve been in the meeting and I’m paying attention, sometimes I miss something. Kind of nice to just be able to go. Wait, did anybody talk about this before I bring it up? Because you know, it’s an hour and a half into a meeting, I can’t remember every topic that we’ve covered so far.
Brent Warner 24:05
Yeah, and for students too, they could be like, “Hey, you know, teachers talking about this, but I don’t know what that means. Like, what am I? What am I missing here? Right, and so you know, even things like that, like, are hugely valuable. And I’ve seen it in the past. Like, students get lost on one thing early on, and then the whole classes is a wash for them, right? Like they get they’re getting nothing out of it until they get that one core concept, and so so lots of cool little things to play with inside of there. You know, there are features that are worth exploring. Tim, you there there is a link specifically to all the new things at Zoom, I know that you had found that.
Tim Van Norman 24:46
Yeah, that’s here. It’s actually zoom.com/en/products/what-new’s. So what’s w h a t s. New, and that that’s kind of an evergreen thing. They just update it every month, with what’s new, and it’s pretty useful to go back through and see what is new. What are they making changes to? There’s a lot of stuff on the Zoom phone. There’s a lot of stuff on Zoom. Is really coming out with all kinds of different integrations,
Brent Warner 25:22
Yeah, lots, lots and lots and lots of features, and so you know, just every once in a while, do a scan through it, see what’s valuable to you. If like me, when I was reading through some of it, I’m like, I do not know what any of that means, and then Tim, you kind of clarified you’re like, oh, well, that’s for like customer support purposes that are totally separate from. So you know you have to kind of pick and choose and figure out what works for your your needs or not. But you know it’s all there for you, and so we do recommend just help you keep on top of some of these changes. You know, even just knowing one or two of them can sometimes make your life a lot easier. So worth worth a couple of minutes of exploration every once in a while.
Tim Van Norman 26:02
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website@thehigheredtechpodcast.com.
Brent Warner 26:13
As always, we do want your feedback, so please go to thehigheredtechpodcast.com and let us know your thoughts.
Tim Van Norman 26:20
For everyone at IVC that’s listening, if you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. You got questions about technology in your classroom? Please contact me, Tim Van Norman, at tvan Norman at ivc.edu.
Brent Warner 26:33
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.
Tim Van Norman 26:38
I’m Tim Van Norman,
Brent Warner 26:40
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care, everybody.
Zoom made a ton of updates over the summer and it’s hard to keep up with all of them. Tim and Brent share out some of the major functional changes that affect our daily use as educators.