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Class technologies recently made some changes to how they host and serve up recordings created in Collaborate Ultra.
This involved changing the domain used by the content provider where the recordings are hosted.
This has been tested on the University of Edinburgh network and all mainstream ISPs, however there are some organisations, especially those with stringent firewall configurations where this domain might be unreachable.
There is a simple method to test if this change will be an issue for our external end users or not, simply attempt to visit the URL –https://test-sms.cloudfront.cdn.bbcollab.com/test.mp4 – if the video appears then no further action is needed.
Please pass this information on to any colleagues who may be working from an external site, especially colleagues who work from NHS sites as these areas tend to have the most stringent firewall configurations in place.
If any issues are identified, please let the Collaborate Service team know by emailing – IS.Helpline@ed.ac.uk – they will then be able to work with the external partner to have the necessary traffic whitelisted.
A year after first being licenced at the University, Zoom is now 1) licenced to cover teaching and 2) integrated within the University Learn VLE. Both of these changes should benefit many teaching staff (and students) within the School. When first licenced and implemented within the University teaching was not covered within the Zoom licence. This has now been changed.
And over the summer 2021, Zoom was integrated within the Learn VLE, which allows staff to schedule and access Zoom meetings within their Learn courses. After adding the Zoom tool to a Learn course, staff and students will be able to access a course-specific meeting schedule and cloud recording library and the scheduler will display all meetings scheduled for the course.
More details on Zoom, the integration with Learn and the training available for using Zoom are available from the ISG website here. Support for Zoom is available from IS.Helpline@ed.ac.uk.
The Informatics Teaching Festival is back for a second consecutive year.
Join us for the opportunity to:
hear interesting presentations around lessons learned in the past year and good practice in online/hybrid teaching from colleagues and inspiring speakers from other schools
listen to the feedback provided by student representatives regarding their experience with studying in an online/hybrid context
listen to the feedback provided by teaching support and administrative staff as to their experience with teaching and administration this past year
learn about new approaches to teaching and educational software
share your own experience with teaching delivery, student support and course administration during workshops and informal GatherTown meetings
reflect and come up with ideas together for improving our delivery of online and hybrid teaching, both as a school and in our different courses.
If you’d like to attend any of the following sessions, and are not a member of the School of Informatics, please register your interest here, and a Collaborate link will be emailed to you in advance of the session(s).
The features available in Teams are constantly being added to and evolving for the many use cases in business and education settings.
ILTS have been trying to collect some of the lesser-known features and tips to share. Feel free to add some more tips to the comments below!
Meetings
Roles in Meetings
It is worth noting that some of the features described in this section are only available if you are the “organiser” of the meeting, which means you were the person who setup the meeting. The most obvious tasks where this would be relevant to teaching scenarios is for managing breakout rooms or downloading attendance sheets.
It is possible to set the roles of a meeting in advance or during the session, the instructions for this are below:
If you are recording meetings for your class you need to make sure these recordings are readily available and accessible. Your recording will be stored by default within the Teams space for 20 days and is accessible from the meeting instance.
Note: ILTS have been working with Information Services to get this 20 day restriction removed. All Semester 2 course organisers have now been moved to a license which removes this restriction. If you are still seeing this restriction within your Team, please get in touch with us asap.
You can choose to move your video to storage in OneDrive / Stream, or choose to download your recording and upload it to the Media Hopper Create service. In both instances you must ensure that you have enabled the auto-captioning feature.
This process is changing across Teams in early 2021 – up-to-date guidance on how to link/share meeting recordings can be found below:
Meeting organisers can download a spreadsheet of all participants of a Teams Meeting. You can find this option at the top of the participants panel from within the team meeting.
In the classroom it can be really useful to do quick snap-polls to trigger some engagement with the class, gauge reactions, spark debate.
Using the integration with MS Forms it is possible to link polls/surveys to your meeting to be complete before or during a meeting. MS Forms is a really useful survey tool as a standalone solution but the integration means it is possible to direct participants to the poll from within the meeting.
TopHat is of course available as an alternative to Forms if you already use this service for class interactions.
Breakout Groups/Rooms
The use of breakout groups has been a long-standing requirement of virtual classrooms to allow for smaller discussions, sub-topics, activities, etc. This functionality has recently been added to MS Teams and can be triggered by the meeting Organiser.
Note this functionality is only available in meetings with multiple participants (not just 1-1 or small meetings). This functionality is only available via desktop clients.
Raise Hands
Raising hand in a busy session is a polite way of alerting the host of the session that you wish to contribute without interrupting the flow of the meeting. The functionality is very simple and available to all participants. If multiple hands are raised the participants will be placed in the order that the hands were raised.
If you are chairing a meeting it can be a good idea to let participants know that they may need to raise their hand before the floor will be open to them.
If you are attending a meeting from a particularly noisy location: air-con in the office, a busy café, or working from home while home-schooling, then you can turn on noise suppression to try and minimise the background noise when your mic is turned on.
Best practice is to have all microphones off for all those who are not speaking. We would also strongly recommend the use of headphones for all participants to minimise feedback.
Zooming-in
Not to be confused with the other video conferencing platform – it is possible to zoom-in and zoom-out of the contents being shared to screen to make things more clear to see, something especially useful if working from a small screen or window.
Similar to how you might increase or decrease your browser contents you can use Ctrl or Cmd +/- depending on your device.
As we are all becoming involved in an increasing number of teams, the amount of content and activity you need to be aware of and prioritise becomes a challenge. Some of your spaces might be of just general interest, so choose to browse at your leisure; there are some spaces that you might check on a more regular basis; and some that you want to have your finger on the pulse for so you can react to the latest posts.
The notifications allow you to customise your general settings as well as the settings on a per team and channel basis. You can also choose what notifications you should be emailed about.
If you want to make sure that important content is not missed you can force notifications to be sent out to specific people or to members of a team or channel by using an @mention. In your comment start typing @ and you will be able to pick from a list of individuals or channels if you want to highlight something to them in a post or reply.
If you forget to include your @mention then the person may not be notified, especially if the post is a reply to another post.
I’m sure many of you will have found a handy tip that has improved the way you use/manage the content in Teams. Please feel free to share using the comments below and we can try and incorporate these in future posts and guidance.
