Zoom is a new cloud teleconferencing tool that makes recordable mobile teleconferencing in HD resolution easy. The mobile apps for iOS and Android both have a clean and simple design and support meetings for up to 25 attendees. Meetings can be started at the touch of 1 button, or they can be scheduled as recurring sessions with options for inviting attendees either before or during the live meeting. Once live, anyone in the meeting has the ability to share their screen or assign control of their screen to any chosen attendee. This makes for an amazing collaborative experience. The video quality is superb and there are great annotation tools including arrows, text, sketch, and cursor highlights to help you get your ideas across. Even with several attendees ,the meetings maintain a smooth frame rate. While screen sharing with multiple attendees is great, there are unfortunately no tools to chapter or marker the session in case any attendee wants to review a particular portion of the recorded session. This is a functionality that Adobe Connect includes, and one that is sorely missing here. The final notable downside is that when you enter the meeting, your camera goes live instantly. This means you must be ready IMMEDIATELY after starting the meeting. Usually this isn’t a large problem, but it would be nice to have an option to leave the camera and mic off until the user chooses to activate. When a meeting is completed, Zoom automatically compiles the video file (if recorded) into .mp4 format which plays on virtually all media players, including Quicktime which makes viewing your sessions on your mobile device easy. The Zoom app itself is free, and the account remains free for all unrecorded conferences and recorded conferences provided they are no longer than 40 minutes. Fees apply for meetings recorded beyond 40 minutes which means for most people, using this app is 100% free of charge. All things considered, Zoom clearly offers more pros than cons for a user looking for a recordable mobile video conferencing solution. To see a side by side comparison between Zoom and other video conferencing solutions please see the following chart.
Zoom- Learning as a Social Activity
3 responses to “Zoom- Learning as a Social Activity”
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Hi Lindsay! I’m so glad you posted about Zoom! It’s definitely the most popular teleconferencing app during COVID! Zoom’s success is largely attributed to its usability and affordability. A lot of people (including teachers) preferred zoom because of how easy it is to setup and the super user-friendly interface. Participants can access the meeting via a link without even registering for a Zoom account. Best of all, it’s free to use!
In addition to the great recording feature, I find the polling feature and breakout room feature of Zoom very useful when teaching or meeting with a group. The whiteboard feature for annotations you mentioned is very useful as well! Compared to other video conferencing applications, I think Zoom has more features suitable for education. For the issue you mentioned about the camera going live immediately, I think there’s an option to turn off video for the host and participants when you schedule the meeting. If you toggle that option, your video will be off when you join the meeting, but you can turn it on when you are ready.
On the other hand, Google Hangouts, Skype, Microsoft Teams have enough features to support business meetings while having less security concerns compared to Zoom. I definitely think that companies like Google and Microsoft will learn from Zoom and improve their own products to compete!
As we moved into the pandemic, zoom seemed to become a household name that everyone was using very quickly. The features spoken about above have business, family, and government access to large meetings across large distances. Although it may have seemed like a tool before it is not almost entirely necessary and apart of everyones day. Education included.
This app would be great for people who have global businesses in many different locations. What a great opportunity to share and collaborate. I wonder if skype or google hangouts will try to include something like this to compete?