New Zoom Features: Pinning Users, Breakout Rooms, and Muting Controls

Zoom has released a few new features for adding functionality to their platform. Two of these are useful in general, and one helps increase Zoom's accessibility for individuals who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing. 

Pinning Users to the Meeting Screen

In an effort to increase accessibility, Zoom now gives users the option to "pin" certain users to their custom personal view, regardless of who may be speaking at the time. This is helpful students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing as it allows both the students and their sign language interpreters to always be visible on the screen. 

 

Changes to Breakout Rooms

Breakout rooms have been a standard in Zoom for a long time, but the newest update brings a few changes. Rather than being organized by the instructor, students can now select their own breakout rooms and move between the rooms if necessary. This can be useful for group-work where you want groups to be able to check in with each other without having to come back to the room at large to do so. 

 

More Control Over Muting

While muting and unmuting are usually controlled by meeting participants, a new feature allows hosts to selectively unmute user audio, as long as everyone in the meeting has that setting turned on. This is useful for users who have difficulty turning on their audio or remembering that they are muted.

 

 

What settings would you like to see in Zoom? Let Learning Technologies know in the comments below! 

Canvas Updates for August 2020

 

Canvas releases updates on the third Saturday of every month in sessions called sprints. There were a few new features released for August of 2020.

Bulk Delete Pages

Being new to building Canvas courses can often mean a lot of mistakes (or at least it does for the author!) Canvas has made it easier be free of these "mistakes" as multiple pages can be deleted at one time in the Pages Index page.  

Course Section Visibility

While all students are visible under the People area of each course, there is a column labeled Section that lets users know which student is in each section. This column can now be removed so that students cannot see who is in each section of the course. 

 

Some instructors use sections within a single course to create groups that have different due dates. Sometimes these due dates are based on a private, potentially identifying reason (illness, personal issue, etc.) that they might not want other students to know. By removing the section column, instructors can continue to use sections to group students without publicizing this information to the rest of the course. 

 

 

The Global Announcements Page

 

Global Announcements is a new option under the User Navigation Menu that allows users to view announcements that were previously dismissed from the Dashboard. 

The Global Announcements page defaults to the Current Announcements tab, which displays all active announcements for the institution. There is also a Recent tab that allows users to refer back to older announcements (as long as their end date has been within the past four months.)