More Zoom features for educators

Zoom Video Communications, Inc. has announced new features for education, in response to requests from teachers and administrators.

These features include Zoom’s Chat and Meetings offerings which are designed to support teachers who need to engage and manage students joining class remotely or submitting homework assignments.

Chromebooks are a popular choice for students and teachers. Virtual background and blur are now available for Zoom for Chrome Progressive Web Application (PWA) users. Zoom developed this capability after requests from various education customers.

“Virtual background and blur for Chromebooks are extremely beneficial to our students and teachers. Many students were reluctant to turn their cameras on before this feature enhancement,” said Rod Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Clayton County Public Schools.

Breakout Rooms also received enhancements in this latest release. Program Audio allows meeting hosts to share content with audio to Breakout Rooms, adding the ability to share videos with audio. With the LTI Pro integration enhancement, educators can populate Breakout Rooms from the course roster. This can be used to assign Breakout Rooms in advance, then automatically sort students into Breakout Rooms.

Other new features include sending audio and video messages into Zoom Chat, and the ability to rename participants in the Waiting Room. Asynchronous video allows users the time to consider their responses and then record as needed to provide thoughtfully crafted responses. Users can click “video” at the bottom of the chat client and record up to a three-minute video message that goes directly into the out-of-meeting chat channel. This is useful for situations such as students submitting brief video assignments. Renaming participants before they join the meeting can be useful for attendance taking where students may be using shared devices, for creating an anonymous student group or for affirming gender identity.

In addition, Anywhere Polls will allow polling content to live in a central repository that can be accessed from any meeting on an account, instead of being associated with a particular meeting. This will make it easier for instructors to reuse polls and will also be beneficial for grading. This feature will be available soon.

“We work closely with our global K–12 and higher education customers, taking their requests into account and involving them in feature development. As a direct result of this, Zoom developed these exciting new features for education,” said Johann Zimmern, Global Education Strategy Lead, Zoom.

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