Online Learning with Zoom

Online learning has become very prominent over the past couple of months due to the covid-19 worldwide pandemic which has seen many businesses and educational institutions move to an online platform. With this move to online learning, conferencing platforms have become the new normality when it comes to teaching, therefore with this expansion of conferencing applications to the classroom it brings new challenges for students and teachers. These applications are not fostering creativity however by moving to an online platform it requires that children think outside the box when completing tasks and teachers are planning lessons as the lessons still need to be engaging.

An application that has been favoured by educators is Zoom. Zoom is a conferencing app that allows up to 100 people to be hosted, this allows for maximum exposure (Zoom, 2020). As Zoom has been at the forefront of the move to online learning and video lessons all students and teachers have learnt to use its simplistic platform. Through Zoom’s simplistic platform it allows for students and teachers to interact together and in groups through zoom’s ‘breakout rooms’ which allows the teacher to split students into working groups. This feature is great to keep students engaged with their work and to keep them on task.

Advantages to using Zoom is that it allows for teachers to interacts with their class and it can be a very useful tool to use during this lockdown period, by using zoom it allows for teacher to communicate with their students and assign work that needs to be completed. However as aforementioned it does not allow for creative thinking but does allow for teachers to design and scaffold lessons that can foster creativity in students particularly in the way that they submit their work and the type of work they complete. By doing this it maintains students engagement not only with the Zoom lesson but also with the work associated with the lesson. According to Bonser (2020) it is important to be prepared and well organised for a Zoom lesson this includes having a working microphone that is high quality so students are able to understand, having multiple smart devices and camera angles if demonstrating a topic this gives the educator the opportunity to use a variety of sources to keep the students engaged. Bonser also states that not being able to see all students when teaching is a draw back as teacher are unable to catch students that may be falling behind or not paying attention.