Well this has been an interesting week to say the least.  With the ever evolving covid-19 crisis taking place around the world right now, UVic shifted from face to face classes to online instruction this week.  So for our Tech class, our entire cohort participated in the lesson through a Zoom call.  This was my first time using Zoom, and though I was skeptical at first about how 32 students and an instructor could all be on one video call, it actually worked really well!  It was very easy to join the call as Rich had emailed everyone a link.  A couple features that I liked about the Zoom program were that you could change how you viewed everyone on the call.  When I first joined the call, whoever was speaking would show up on the main part of the screen, and then 3 or 4 other people would show along the side in a smaller frame.  Everyone else would be out of view and only connected through audio. However, there was an option you could click on that showed everyone who was on the call in thumbnail size frames so that you could see everyone all at once.  This was nice as it connected everyone together more, and you could see peoples expressions and participate in conversations a little better.  We were doing group presentations as well, and so having the feature where everyone could be muted except those presenting was a good to have as it prevented hearing a lot of background noise and interruptions.  The presenting group could also split their screen so that everyone could see their PowerPoint slides as well and follow along with the presentation.  I really liked that feature (even though I couldn’t quite get mine to work properly) because originally I thought we would just have to talk about our topic to the group without being able to show the slides because I didn’t understand how we would be able to through a video call.

So all in all I think Zoom is a great tool to use when making a video call.  I was apprehensive about using it at first but found it very user friendly.  The only difficulty I found was when I tried to split my screen to show my slide presentation I couldn’t get the presentation view to work.  On my screen it looked like it was working but on the rest of the groups screens they were just seeing the slides in edit view.  Other than that I thought everything worked smoothly, and I enjoyed using it.  One thing I would be curious about learning however, is what the process is to set up a call.  We didn’t get to experience that part of the program as our teacher had everything set up so I’m not sure what that entails.