Educational Technology Updates (Zoom, Teams, Stream)

Zoom

The 2021-2022 academic year is shaping up to be an exciting year in terms of educational technology. Zoom has been added to Durham College’s digital tools landscape. While the DC Connect integration is not yet ready to launch, faculty now can use Zoom through the DC Zoom portal.

Zoom will allow you to enhance your technology-enabled teaching and learning with features such as advanced polls, multi-user annotations, personalized waiting room, annotations, and breakout rooms. The student experience will be simple – add your meeting link to your DC Connect calendar/course and students can access your classroom through a single click of a button.

The CTL has curated Zoom resources to support your teaching and learning. We are offering two Zoom professional development workshops: “How to Use Zoom – The Basics 100” and “Zoom: Level up and Q&A 300”. If you cannot attend the CTL’s live sessions, you can also access Zoom’s extensive training supports. There are live training sessions on various Zoom topics.

Throughout the year, the CTL will continue to work with you to refine the Zoom experience. We are always happy to hear your thoughts and ideas – please share them in the CTL Suggestion Box located at the end of this newsletter.

Recording in Teams / The New Stream Experience

Currently, all Teams recordings are stored in either OneDrive or SharePoint (rather than Stream). Any one-on-one Teams recordings (recordings not conducted within a specific team) will be saved to a file titled Recordings in the host’s OneDrive. Any Teams channel recordings will be stored in a “Recordings” folder located in the file tab of the channel.

Teams Start Transcription

This new storage system will allow for a simple and smooth sharing experience. Much like any other OneDrive file, you can access a shareable link for the recording to post in DC Connect for your students.

Two important points to remember:

  • In a non-channel meeting (ones scheduled through outlook), to ensure that closed captions are available during playback for recordings, you must select “start transcription” (located beneath the “start recording” in the more menu) at the time of recording (see screenshot). Closed captions for recordings cannot be added after the recording is completed, as they were in Stream (Classic)
  • If you are in a Teams channel meeting and you do NOT see start transcription, you will be able to record your session and then upload it to Stream (classic) to ensure that captioning is generated. From there you can share your video with your students. See these instructions for further details

The changes to Microsoft Stream will be evolving throughout this year. Please visit the CTL website on captioning for updates.

App Retirement / Bongo Virtual Classroom and Video Assignment

Both Bongo Virtual Classroom and Bongo Video Assignment will be retired after this fall semester. These tools will no longer be available for the Durham College community as of January 2022.