I'VE STARTED USING my laptop and Note 9 screens to stay in touch with people through Zoom. I feel I'm getting closer to people by having meaningful conversations and then documenting the process through open education initiatives.
You can spot the yellow COVID-19 signage all around South Tipperary where I live. I hear senior managers and responsible officials outline how to enact social distancing and I'm trying to figure out how to port 20 hours of cancelled lab sessions in to online meet-ups.
I don't think I can convert to an online platform the syllabus-directed 24 hours of lectures and 48 hours of structured online discussion during the next two weeks. I lack some technical components because I loaned my best audio equipment to a student who needs it to complete his final year project and I don't have a green screen at home. I cannot sneak into the Clonmel Digital Campus to use idle equipment there because I have no child care provision for my two primary school children.
Instead, I'm staying sane by assuming I am contagious as I sanitise my hands at least six times daily, remain at least two metres away from people, and consider that anything I touch might infect me.
Since I cannot complete all the syllabus-directed hands-on tasks with students in person, I have reiterated the tasks my students have to finish by specifying them as checklist items on both Moodle and Microsoft Class Notebooks. Following department guidance, I deleted or revised up to one third of the final assessments because I cannot work monitor required tasks over the shoulder of students.
I plan to ask students for weekly responses through a free Socrative account [1] I've used for the past four years. I am using a paid Zoom account for both one-on-one review sessions and for one-to-many doc-in-the-box lectures. [2] My students can book private video sessions with me by using Calendly. [3]
I hope I'm able to save our Zoom Conferences in a time capsule so that educators a century from now can see how we worked through a global pandemic. I think some of my work during these challenging times would interest readers of the CESI-List in Ireland. It's handy to see how Zoom lets me save my conference sessions in the cloud and then allows me to download them for content that I can push out as Moodle RSS feeds.
Listen to "Behind Screens Of Social Isolation E492" on Spreaker.Students know they can book a half hour session with me via https://calendly.com/topgold/clonmel if they want up to 30 minutes of one-on-one time inside Zoom. When they do that, a short description of the student contact is recorded by Contactually. [4]
They also know to reach me via LinkedIn messaging [5] if they want the fastest responses. I'm impressed at how resilient LinkedIn live videos are performing during this Corona Virus pandemic.
- https://b.socrative.com/student/login and realise I need to restart my monthly payment so I can run several rooms simultaneously.
- My Zoom Room is open at set times for one-to-many and at specific times for one-on-one by student request.
- Calendly links directly to my Google Calendar and I like that convenience.
- Contactually pulls information from my Google Calendar, my Gmail account, and from SMS sessions on my Samsung Note 9.
- I'm topgold on LinkedIn. I plan to share these ideas with several Open Educators who use LinkedIn.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus for the Limerick Institute of Technology. The top image was screencapped during a Zoom session across seven time zones.]
