Tech Talk
Lewiston-Porter Teacher Edition Issue #4
We could all use a laugh!
Best Practices for Securing Zoom Meetings
- Do NOT post pictures of your virtual class on social media or elsewhere online and do NOT record meetings with students and share. This is a FERPA violation. While it’s fun to share in the excitement of connecting over Zoom, we are particularly committed to protecting the privacy of K-12 users and discourage publicly posting images of students, especially minors, in a Zoom virtual classroom.
- Use the virtual waiting room feature: This will allow you to admit students as needed. It will also allow you to restrict unwanted guests from joining.
- Use a random meeting ID: It’s best practice to generate a random meeting ID for your class, so it can’t be shared multiple times. This is the better alternative to using your Personal Meeting ID, which is not advised because it’s basically an ongoing meeting that’s always running.
- Password-protect the classroom: Create a password and share with your students via school email so only those intended to join can access a virtual classroom.
- Disable join before host: Students cannot join class before the teacher joins and will see a pop-up that says, “The meeting is waiting for the host to join.“
- Manage annotation: Teachers should disable participant annotation in the screen sharing controls to prevent students from annotating on a shared screen and disrupting class.
- Disable video: Turn off a student’s video to block distracting content or inappropriate gestures while class is in session.
- Mute students: Mute/unmute individual students or all of them at once. Mute Upon Entry (in your settings) is also available to keep the clamor at bay when everyone files in.
- Attendee on-hold: An alternative to removing a user, you can momentarily disable their audio/video connections. Click on the attendee’s video thumbnail and select Start Attendee On-Hold to activate.
Google Meet
For best practices in distance learning, review the Teacher’s Guide to Hangouts Meet.
- For education accounts, only the meeting creator, calendar event owner, or person who sets up a meeting on an in-room hardware device can mute or remove video meeting participants. This ensures student participants can’t mute or remove one another or the teacher. (This automatic restriction was applied to all education accounts, starting March 19, 2020.)
- When using Meet, participants can turn off their camera to show their profile photo instead. This can improve video meeting quality if internet speed is slow. If audio quality is poor, use a phone for audio instead.
- For large classes, use a live stream instead of having students join an interactive video class meeting. To engage students while live streaming, you can use Google Slides Q&A. Or, you can pre-record a lesson to share later.
- To help students who are deaf or hard of hearing, turn on live captions in Meet. To capture student responses for a recorded class, use Google Slides Q&A.
Recent updates
Approve requests to join—During a video meeting, only the meeting creator can see and approve requests to join the meeting from outside of the school’s G Suite domain.
The following updates have started rolling out and should be available to all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers within 2-3 weeks.
- Manage participants—Only the meeting creator can mute or remove participants.
- Prevent meeting reuse—Students can’t rejoin the call if teachers leave a nicknamed meeting last.
Data Update
Nicholas Hill
Lewiston-Porter Central Schools
For immediate technology needs please call (716) 821-7171
On campus technicians: Ken Bass (Monday & Tuesday); Jeff Murphy (Wednesday-Friday)
Tech Integrator: Melanie Kitchen (Mondays & Tuesdays)
Email: nhill@lew-port.com
Website: www.lew-port.com/technology_services
Phone: (716) 286-7295
Facebook: Facebook.com/LewistonPorterCentralSchools/
Twitter: @lewportcsd