Sessions /
The How and Why of Our Zoom-ified Future #1070

Jumping head-first into the sudden challenge of adopting Zoom for higher-level national university engineering students, I had to figure out how to apply all the lessons of my two-year post-graduate teaching diploma to ESL in this brave yet potentially abrasive new context. It was sink or swim time--but my informal survey results using Google Forms right after the midterm exam were good; and to my surprise, I was voted best teacher for the semester. A colleague mentioned how that could work against me as students often vote teachers best for letting them leave class early, but that was why it was all so surprising to me: I had often run *overtime* trying to fit too much into the only two hours of contact time per week I shared with each class. What on Earth did I do? Please bring your own questions and/or stories of success and failure using Zoom or other similar synchronous online software to share. This workshop-type session will start with sharing in small groups, move to reviewing within the whole group, and end with a wrap-up as I offer a description reviewing a list of what worked consistently with all my classes, including evidence from students such as quoted comments and scores from evaluation feedback. Questions will be welcome at the start and end of the session.