Bring Your Lessons to Life this School Year With Zoom

It’s that time of year again — time to prep lesson plans, get the classroom ready, and plan an entire year of exciting and engaging learning experiences! And we at Zoom have been hard at work to develop features and solutions that can help you bring your lessons to life and open your student’s eyes to the wonders of the world. 

Designed to help you create an organized, dynamic education environment, our Zoom Workplace offering helps you enhance learning experiences for your students, no matter where they’re located. 

Here are a few of the solutions you’ll have access to as part of a Zoom Workplace license: 

Give your students a central hub for communicating and connecting with Zoom Chat. This chat solution — native to the Zoom platform — serves as a space where they can chat with other classmates, receive important documents and resources, or ask questions. 

You can use a handful of chat features to help transform your students’ learning experience: 

• Create chat groups for enhanced education: Designating chat channels and groups for different projects, classes, and more provides a space where students can share resources like notes or answer each other’s questions. 
• Use Zoom Chat to issue important reminders: Use a classwide chat to remind students of upcoming homework assignments, field trips, quizzes, holidays, or even better, snow day cancellations.
• Share whiteboards directly to chat: Instantly share resources created using Zoom Whiteboard with your students, or create a space where they can share whiteboards amongst each other.

Help students illustrate their ideas and capture their attention with our all new Zoom Whiteboard. Our expandable canvas creates a space before, during, and after lessons where students can engage with each other and use a range of features to brainstorm, problem-solve, and work together. 

Students can add shapes, leave comments, upload photos, and freehand draw on whiteboards, equipping them with the tools they need to transform their brainstorming sessions and group projects.  

Here are just a few ways you can use Zoom Whiteboard in your classroom:

• Engagement for in-person and remote students: Create content on whiteboards before class begins, then use it to deliver and structure the lesson, including allowing students to come up and draw on the board themselves (or invite remote students to annotate live!).
• See how your students think: Assign different whiteboards to groups of students and receive a visual breakdown of how they progressed throughout the project and came up with their final product.
• Create a collaboration ready environment: Give your university and college-level students an environment to collaborate in by equipping them with Workspace Reservation. They can use this feature to reserve a whiteboard-enabled room on campus where they can invite their friends, check in, and use their whiteboard for group activities.

Zoom Meetings has become an increasingly critical solution for delivering exceptional learning experiences to students around the world. And new ways to engage students both in the classroom and at home are emerging all the time! 

With Zoom Meetings, you can: 

• Create virtual field trips: Whether you’re teaching K-12 or a university course, you can livestream your field trips so remote learners can attend. You can also record the experience to create virtual test questions and unique content for future lessons.
• Help students focus: With our Focus mode enabled, educators can see their students’ video feeds, while students can only see the educators’ feed, helping to avoid distractions and provide students with additional privacy. 
• Enhance lesson review: Streamline lessons by launching live polls, which you can use to run true or false, multiple choice, and fill in the blank questions.
• Bring story time to life: Create incredible and interactive story experiences with the Avatar feature, screen sharing, breakout rooms, and more. 
• Host office hours: Use your personal meeting ID to create after-school or before-school office hours and give your higher education students a space where they can drop in to visit with you.

We offer a suite of integrations with popular education solutions to help you organize and enhance your classroom experience. This includes apps like Live2Coursera, Wooclap, Kahoot!, and more! Be sure to visit our blog for more information. 

With one-to-many capability, Zoom Webinars is an excellent solution for teachers looking to share important lessons or communicate with a large number of students without being interrupted. 

With Zoom Webinars, you can: 

• Record valuable content: Record evergreen lessons or test prep sessions to share with students, or even welcome videos or training material for new hires.
• Create professional guest lectures: Create an organized and professional atmosphere for guest lecturers, either in-class or remotely, where they can speak uninterrupted and answer questions in an orderly fashion.
• Simplify hosting large classes: Need to minimize interruptions for your large hybrid higher education classes? Create a registration list to see who attended and create an intuitive one-to-many experience while using a designated co-host to manage questions and the chat.

Zoom also has other solutions that can help to support your lesson plans, school activities, and staff outside the classroom as well. 

Now you’re probably thinking, “How can I use a phone in a classroom setting? It’s hard enough keeping students off their phones!” While this may be true, Zoom Phone can be a valuable tool for teachers and educators with features like: 

• Persistent cloud phone availability: Use your phone to quickly communicate with on-campus resources right from the Zoom mobile app, all without divulging your personal phone number. 

• E911: Emergency crews can find your exact location on campus faster with E911, which provides emergency services with your location and how to get there. 

School events play an important role in the school experience, and now you can take those events digital with Zoom Events! With Zoom Events, you can enhance your students’ experience by:

• Hosting hybrid events: Take your college’s engagement to the next level by taking job fairs, fundraisers, charity events, orientation, campus tours, and more into the digital space. 
• Providing professional development resources for teachers: Create training sessions, onboarding resources, or hybrid learning thought leadership events using our intuitive event management interface.
• Sharing classic school events: Allow students (and parents) to safely and securely participate in important school events from home, such as prom, science fairs, talent shows, or even create brand new creative experiences for other students to enjoy.

Want to learn more about how you can use Zoom’s unified communications platform to transform how you deliver education? Be sure to visit our Zoom for Education page, or schedule a demo with a Zoom expert today!