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First day teaching in-person in a gymnasium-turned-classroom space. I tried to get over there 20 minutes early but somehow burned through the first 10 minutes of that time without realizing it.
There were 2 microphones, one battery-operated and one wired. The battery-operated one worked for about the first half of the lecture and then it crapped out for unknown reasons (seemed to restart after the end of lecture?). I couldn't find any way to adjust the gain for the wired microphone so I couldn't use it. Students in the back couldn't hear me too well. Those of you who know me IRL know that I am often very loud, so that kind of tells you something. I used the mic until I couldn't anymore.
I think we were the only class in there today, meaning we were at least spared the auditory hell of multiple classes in a gymnasium at the same time that colleagues experienced earlier in the week.
Oh, three microphones, actually. Also a microphone for the Zoom-ins. Once I got the Zoom-in microphone configured they could hear me just fine. I could barely hear the Zoom-ins, though, through the computer speakers. I told them we'd communicate by visual signal and with the chat.
I believe that the audio for the Zoomers was completely separate from the amplification for in-person students. I hope.
Two remotes. One for the projector, one for the camera. I eventually got the camera pointed at myself, and then for unknown reasons its screen on Zoom went black. At the end of lecture I turned the camera off then on again and then it seemed fine again. Who knows.
The projector was hidden back behind the screen. The image it produced seemed dim. Not much I could do about that in the heat of the moment. There wasn't an easy way to plug the projector into my laptop to use all of the things I have pre-configured on my laptop, so I had to run back to my office to get a USB drive to transfer files onto the "podium" desktop computer. Got to love that last-minute warmup sprint right before lecture starts. Oh, the "podium" was one of those plastic folding tables. I discovered that I have Opinions about the importance of full-height podiums. I might bring a big plastic bin with me next time as a makeshift tabletop podium. I CANNOT teach sitting down. I have to stand to be able to project my voice effectively.
The one thing I was extremely happy to see was a Ladibug document camera. Many of our classrooms here have a different, nicer type of document camera that's hooked up to the lecture a/v controls, but as best I can tell those document cameras can't interface with Zoom. And writing on the whiteboard really doesn't work for Zoom or when the whiteboard is the size of a postage stamp and you're teaching students spaced 6ft apart in a gymnasium. The Ladibug is controlled through the lecture computer, so I knew I could set up the same type of screen-sharing that I've been using on Zoom this week, where I line up my lecture slides on part of the shared zone and then line up a document camera view on the other part of the shared zone.
Except that when I launched the software, it immediately entered a software update dialogue and eventually wanted to reboot the computer!
Fortunately, when I told it "No, don't reboot now" it still actually fired up and ran.
Just the extra last-minute stress I needed.
So what I ultimately wound up with was:
-Zoom session on my laptop with my laptop camera pointing at me so the Zoomers could see me.
-PDF slides + doc-cam view on the lecture desktop computer all screen-shared with Zoomers.
-Teaching via muffled shouting through my mask, straining to hear students muffled by their masks
-Hunching over to write stuff on the paper under the doc cam
-Deploying the auxiliary battery-operated light I brought with me to make the doc cam as bright as possible
-Briefly trying out the Zoom Annotate tools to circle things on the slides, but finding that cumbersome and quickly giving up.
Somehow, miraculously, we actually managed to get through all of the lecture material I wanted to cover, plus I got all the students organized into their lab groups and through their first review quiz. The general feel of the room was a sense of being happy to be there, happy to get organized into lab groups, and happy to get to choose their own lab groups.
And they might have even learned a thing or two.
Snapshot of the stuff I carried over with me to serve as a homebrew doc cam, just in case:
Also, this is all exactly one million times easier than orchestrating a pandemic flipped classroom like I did in the fall. In hindsight, that was awful. Even at the time, it was awful. It will be very hard to convince me to go back to the full hell that is making and editing lecture videos and also running live hybrid lecture sessions. That is just way too much damn time and work, especially when you look back at your video views and discover that there are only 5 views and your class has 35 students in it.
Onward.
There were 2 microphones, one battery-operated and one wired. The battery-operated one worked for about the first half of the lecture and then it crapped out for unknown reasons (seemed to restart after the end of lecture?). I couldn't find any way to adjust the gain for the wired microphone so I couldn't use it. Students in the back couldn't hear me too well. Those of you who know me IRL know that I am often very loud, so that kind of tells you something. I used the mic until I couldn't anymore.
I think we were the only class in there today, meaning we were at least spared the auditory hell of multiple classes in a gymnasium at the same time that colleagues experienced earlier in the week.
Oh, three microphones, actually. Also a microphone for the Zoom-ins. Once I got the Zoom-in microphone configured they could hear me just fine. I could barely hear the Zoom-ins, though, through the computer speakers. I told them we'd communicate by visual signal and with the chat.
I believe that the audio for the Zoomers was completely separate from the amplification for in-person students. I hope.
Two remotes. One for the projector, one for the camera. I eventually got the camera pointed at myself, and then for unknown reasons its screen on Zoom went black. At the end of lecture I turned the camera off then on again and then it seemed fine again. Who knows.
The projector was hidden back behind the screen. The image it produced seemed dim. Not much I could do about that in the heat of the moment. There wasn't an easy way to plug the projector into my laptop to use all of the things I have pre-configured on my laptop, so I had to run back to my office to get a USB drive to transfer files onto the "podium" desktop computer. Got to love that last-minute warmup sprint right before lecture starts. Oh, the "podium" was one of those plastic folding tables. I discovered that I have Opinions about the importance of full-height podiums. I might bring a big plastic bin with me next time as a makeshift tabletop podium. I CANNOT teach sitting down. I have to stand to be able to project my voice effectively.
The one thing I was extremely happy to see was a Ladibug document camera. Many of our classrooms here have a different, nicer type of document camera that's hooked up to the lecture a/v controls, but as best I can tell those document cameras can't interface with Zoom. And writing on the whiteboard really doesn't work for Zoom or when the whiteboard is the size of a postage stamp and you're teaching students spaced 6ft apart in a gymnasium. The Ladibug is controlled through the lecture computer, so I knew I could set up the same type of screen-sharing that I've been using on Zoom this week, where I line up my lecture slides on part of the shared zone and then line up a document camera view on the other part of the shared zone.
Except that when I launched the software, it immediately entered a software update dialogue and eventually wanted to reboot the computer!
Fortunately, when I told it "No, don't reboot now" it still actually fired up and ran.
Just the extra last-minute stress I needed.
So what I ultimately wound up with was:
-Zoom session on my laptop with my laptop camera pointing at me so the Zoomers could see me.
-PDF slides + doc-cam view on the lecture desktop computer all screen-shared with Zoomers.
-Teaching via muffled shouting through my mask, straining to hear students muffled by their masks
-Hunching over to write stuff on the paper under the doc cam
-Deploying the auxiliary battery-operated light I brought with me to make the doc cam as bright as possible
-Briefly trying out the Zoom Annotate tools to circle things on the slides, but finding that cumbersome and quickly giving up.
Somehow, miraculously, we actually managed to get through all of the lecture material I wanted to cover, plus I got all the students organized into their lab groups and through their first review quiz. The general feel of the room was a sense of being happy to be there, happy to get organized into lab groups, and happy to get to choose their own lab groups.
And they might have even learned a thing or two.
Snapshot of the stuff I carried over with me to serve as a homebrew doc cam, just in case:
Also, this is all exactly one million times easier than orchestrating a pandemic flipped classroom like I did in the fall. In hindsight, that was awful. Even at the time, it was awful. It will be very hard to convince me to go back to the full hell that is making and editing lecture videos and also running live hybrid lecture sessions. That is just way too much damn time and work, especially when you look back at your video views and discover that there are only 5 views and your class has 35 students in it.
Onward.
