Well, it’s day three of Zooming with my students, and I’m starting to get in the swing of things. In my district, we are doing a phased in hybrid model, so eventually I will be seeing most of my students in person one day a week each, but my 7th graders are online for this first week. Thursday and Friday we held brief meet and greets with all our students, so today was the first full-length lesson I had with a couple of my classes. I created these Zoom expectations, which I shared with them today. They also contain essential vocabulary needed to communicate using Zoom. I, like most teachers, am asking my students to use the chat for academic purposes only and not to unmute themselves unless asked to participate or they need to tell me something urgent, such as that I’m muted. I have the ability to mute all students and disable the chat, but since I want students to be able to tell me if there’s a tech issue or perhaps pipe in with a question, and there are academic uses for the chat, my plan is not to disable those functions unless necessary within a particular class. So far, there haven’t been any major issues keeping them enabled. Feel free to copy or adapt these expectations for your own classroom. My goal with these norms was to focus on Zoom specifically, and remind them that all other school rules of course still apply (being respectful, etc.).
Update 9/16/20: After another day of Zooming, I realized there were definitely a few expectations I missed, so I have added those to the document.
Click here to access the Zoom expectations. What are your videoconferencing expectations if you’re doing that this year?
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