How to Make Your Time on Zoom More Interactive and Fun, Part 2
With nearly 13 million accounts, Zoom is the platform of choice for many organizations, schools and churches. Many of you have told us you are using Zoom this fall for Awana Clubs. To help you make your virtual club time more interactive and fun, we are bringing you four days of tips. In part one I covered five features of Zoom to get you beyond the basics: Virtual Backgrounds, Chat, Reactions, Nonverbal Feedback and Share Screen. Today, I’ll cover five more.
Breakout Rooms
Breakout Rooms can help you facilitate small group discussions. Set the number of rooms you want to create, and let Zoom randomly put people into those rooms or assign your kids to specific groups. Options allow you to give participants the freedom to move to another room and come back to the main room. Set a time for the breakouts or broadcast a message to all the groups. As a host, you can move throughout the rooms and share a screen with the participants. The participants in their rooms can also enable a whiteboard, which is useful for brainstorming. If you feel the whiteboard feature would lead to playing during breakout time, just disable it. The options for Breakout Rooms must be made before your meeting begins.
Polling
This feature is only available for pro versions, but it has many uses to consider. Polling allows you to create single-response or multiple-response polls. Use it during your meeting to ask a fun question or see how well your students understand the lesson. Choose from anonymous responses or reveal the name of the person who answered your questions. Polls can either be created and saved before the meeting, or you can create one on the spot. If you want to set up a timed quiz that each child takes on their own, Polling allows you to do that. Enable Polling before your meeting begins.
Record your meeting
Zoom gives the host and the participants the opportunity to record your club night. Like other features, you can disable your participants from making a recording. If you have Basic Zoom, your recording will be saved on your device. The pro version of Zoom enables you to save to the Cloud and share the link with someone else. Zoom also works with video editing programs to make adjustments to your recording if you wish. Search the Internet for more information. Recording controls must be set up before the meeting begins.
Reports
This feature, also available in the pro version, allows you to record quiz responses, take attendance, determine how long your students have been online, how many Zoom accounts are running, etc. You can access reports in your personal Zoom home screen.
Security
No doubt you’ve heard the news reports of people across the country Zoom-bombing meetings. It is something that doesn’t need to happen. If you use the same Zoom number for your meetings, ask your families not to share it. A passcode provides extra security, but only if it remains between you and your club.
You may prefer to set up a new meeting each time you gather, using a new Zoom number and passcode. Send out the unique Zoom room information just before your meeting or invite your kids to the meeting once you’ve opened your session.
If you don’t allow your participants to enter the meeting without you or you enable the waiting room, you will have greater control over who is joining you and when. Once everyone has arrived, you can lock the room. Turn on your audio notification for when your kids enter and exit your meeting for additional monitoring of your Zoom room.
Zoom has spent a great deal of energy to provide the features we need to meet virtually. There are many more to discover online by going to either Zoom.us or searching the Internet. Zoom provides tutorials for each feature mentioned above, and special videos for teachers. Check YouTube for even more video tutorials. This video, created for students, can help parents prepare their kids for club.
With Zoom features and your creativity, a virtual Awana club can be as interactive, fun and exciting as gathering in person. For more Zoom features you may not know about, see Part 1 of this four-part series. In Part 3, I share ideas to make your virtual space welcoming; and in Part 4, I explain some games you can play while online.
If you have Zoom tricks and tips to share with us, please tell us about them in the comment section below.
Carla’s work at Awana has been on the communications and marketing teams. It is important to her that Awana leaders and volunteers have the information they need to best disciple the kids in their care, and that these kids grow to become disciplemakers, themselves. When Carla is not at work, she enjoys walking with friends, taking pictures of birds and sunsets, or exploring new places with her husband and daughter.
