Virtual Round Tables: A Zoom Meeting Regarding Zoom

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we are hosting virtual round table conversations where members can get together to share successes, discuss challenges and highlight best practices. At the end of last week, our topic focused on Zoom in a K-12 environment.

We began by sharing the resources available to both educators and administrators to maintain privacy and control.

• Zoom tips and tricks for teachers
• Setting Up and Securing Your School's K-12 Zoom Account

We also covered the top five questions from educators about how to use the platform. (Click the images to see an enlarged version.)

1. How do I share a video?
   
2. Can I turn off annotations in screen share?
   
3. Why is my text backwards?
   
4. Can I show video from another camera?
   
5. How do I keep my students from unmuting themselves?
   

Most of the Q&A was spent with questions about privacy and best practices for administrators.

• Be sure to obtain parental consent before sharing screen captures of any sort.
  The opt-out at the beginning of the year should cover this, but some schools had a form unique to online learning.
• Students should only be joining meetings, not hosting them.
  • Administrators can set this so school addresses cannot be used to create Zoom accounts.
• Require sign in to attend; Zoom has added waiting rooms to all K-12 accounts.
• Lock your meeting once it starts.
• Mute, disable video or remove participants as needed.
• Configure settings so only host can screen share.
• Disable private chat.
• Vanity URL discussion:
  • Zoom says expect 24-hour turn around on a vanity URL; however, if your email address doesn’t match the account you’re asking for, it may take longer for them to verify.
  • If you have trouble or wait longer than 48 hours, contact MOREnet and we'll add you to a consortium help ticket. We were able to help the members on the call within 24 hours.
• What about FERPA?
  • We were lucky to have Scott Summers, the Director of School Law with Missouri School Boards Association, on the line with us. His advice was that he felt like as long as it was a lesson/discussion you were recording, it was okay (with proper parental permissions- such as the opt out form).
    • Be sure teachers know that students should not have their faces shown or recorded in any public manner, including social media.
  • FERPA relates directly to permanent records. If a class is a discussion (not a final presentation), it doesn't directly affect a student’s grade, and, therefore, isn’t covered under FERPA.
  • It’s also possible to record and only give students in the class access.
    • The best way to do this for students who could not attend is to save to Zoom cloud and send that direct link to student(s).
    • It’s possible to add that link/video to your LMS (e.g., Canvas or Google Classroom).
• Zoom admin panel (or Dashboard) allows you to view information ranging from overall usage to who was in each classroom.
  • Members requested a more in-depth training on the Zoom dashboard. Look for that to be scheduled soon.
  • See Zoom's video tutorial on the Zoom dashboard.

We will continue to monitor Zoom’s privacy features and best practices and update you as we learn more or upgrades are made. In the meantime, join us the rest of this month for round table discussions on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 3:30 p.m. at https://zoom.us/my/morenet.training.