Zoom Video Communications has announced new features for education. These features span Zoom’s Chat and Meeting offerings and are designed to support teachers who need to engage and manage students joining class remotely or submitting homework assignments, says the company.
Starting off with the new features, virtual background and blur are now available for Zoom for Chrome Progressive Web Application (PWA) users. The Breakout rooms feature has also received enhancements in this latest release. Program Audio allows meeting hosts to share content with audio to breakout rooms, adding the ability to share videos with audio and with the LTI Pro integration enhancement, educators can populate breakout rooms from the course roster. This can be used to assign breakout rooms in advance, then automatically sort students into breakout rooms.
Anywhere Polls, extra features for Chat and Waiting Room
As per Zoom, Anywhere Polls will allow polling content to live in a central repository that can be accessed from any meeting on an account, instead of being associated with a particular meeting. The company claims that it would make it easier for the instructors to reuse polls and will also be beneficial for grading. The feature will be available this year.
Other new features include sending audio and video messages into Zoom Chat, and the ability to rename participants in the Waiting Room.
Asynchronous video allows users the time to consider their responses and then record as needed to provide thoughtfully-crafted responses. Users can click ‘video’ at the bottom of the chat client and record up to a 3-minute video message that goes directly into the out-of-meeting chat channel.
Renaming participants before they join the meeting can be useful for attendance taking where students may be using shared devices, for creating an anonymous student group or for affirming gender identity, said Zoom.
