Monthly Archives: March 2020

Keep Teaching, social media, Teaching, troubleshooting, tutorial

STOP THE ZOOMBOMBS!

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You made a room from Zoom Meetings in Blackboard.  You know it has a forced password.  You know students will be logging into Blackboard to find the link.  Isn’t that enough to prevent others from joining?  And when I say others, I mean truly foul people who apparently have nothing better to do with their time then really and truly mess up your whole class.  Nope.  We have to do more

After creating your room in Blackboard, leave Blackboard, and sign back into zoom at stonybrook.zoom.us.  Your room will be listed under meetings. Click on the name, go to the bottom on the page and click edit meeting.  Just above there, in meeting options, you will find the “only authenticated users can join” option.  stonybrook.edu will pre-populate for you.  This will force them to use a stonybrook.edu email address and they can no longer be anonymous in the session.

Please note that this means that guest speakers from outside the University will not be able to join.  Nor would high school students be able to participate.  See other methods for tightening up security below the screenshot.

If you want people from outside stonybrook.edu to join, here are other things that you can do:
Never share the meeting link in Social Media.
from the participant list inside an active meeting:
Lock the Zoom Meeting room once everyone has arrived from the participant list.
Mute Participants on Entry & Don’t allow them to unmute themselves.
Remove unwanted visitors* 
Under the share button in an active meeting:
Do not allow participants to share their screen
When you schedule the meeting:
Don’t use recurring meetings.  They all have the same URL and password. Obviously this isn’t as convenient. Maybe try this if you continue to have issues and have tried other steps.
Schedule the meetings outside of Blackboard and only give the students the link from a blackboard announcement or email right before it starts. This way the students will not have the URL to share with others beforehand. This means scheduling from stonybrook.zoom.us and not from Blackboard’s Zoom Meetings menu item.  You will find that setting for Only Authenticated Users right away if you schedule in this manner.
Don’t Allow Students to Join Before the Host
These settings are found in your stonybrook.zoom.us Settings area.
*Don’t Allow Removed Participants to Rejoin.  The default on this setting is for it to be off (which is correct).  What it doesn’t tell you though, is the user that you booted from the room can clear there “cookies” and reenter anyway. So it depends on how savy your bomber is.

“Require a password when scheduling new meetings” – this is locked on.  So you’re good.

“Require a password for Instant Meetings” – default this is on.

“Require a password for Personal Meeting ID” – default this is off. 

In addition, you can disable the setting called “Embed password in meeting link for one-click join”. This means you will have to provide the password in a separate communication from the meeting link. This is much less convenient, but is a deterrent to unwanted visitors.

Consider having a Co-Host to handle these items during the meeting.

and finally:

Shut Down the Meeting

  • In an emergency, end the meeting by clicking “End meeting” in the lower right corner of the Zoom window. Then set-up a new meeting with a unique URL, and send it to participants via a Blackboard Announcement and email, etc.

After having said all that…. don’t you wish people were just nicer??

Keep Teaching, troubleshooting

Zoom feature that doesn’t work as expected

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Polling.  I love polling.  It allows you to engage with a large group of students and comes with all sorts of side reasons to use.. assessment, active learning, demographics, attendance, etc.

But, we are strongly encouraging remote learning these days, as well as asynchronous learning.  This means recording things.  Turns out that zoom cuts polls clean out during a recording.  The screen that is pops up in isn’t part of the recording, and even if you share your display and the poll is on your display when open and as you go through the results, that window is not part of the recording either.

argh.  You could speak the poll question and verbally go over the findings, they just won’t be able to see anything or participate.  So… perhaps a good time to bring Turning Technologies back into the mix??

Let me know what you think in the comments.

 

Keep Teaching, tutorial

Ready, Fire, Aim!

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I’m an admin for a Facebook group called The Connoisseurs of All Things Teaching, Learning & Student Success Related, and we had this webinar posted today on our group by one of our members. I thought it was worthy of a share on the blog.

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I had issues using zoom… here is my story

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Around two years ago, we started doing an exploration of different web conferencing solutions. As part of that, I had a free testing account with zoom. After some time, I had made my mind up on which platform I wanted to recommend, and stopped testing. Time passed and we didn’t immediately switch to the new platform. My account expired with zoom.

Then come the Covid situation and suddenly we are standing zoom up on campus in 24 hours, and for most people it was working great. For me, not so much. If I went to stonybrook.zoom.us I got an error when trying to login with single sign in. If I went to the LTI link in Blackboard, there was mixed results depending on if we tried deleting my account and sending a new invite to the system. I tried incognito windows and different computers/browsers. Nothing worked.

Then finally, I went to zoom.us and tried to open my old test account directly. I didn’t remember the password, and sent off a “forgot password” request. Set the new password, logged in and saw that I could change my email. That seemed hopeful. (In fact I had been telling faculty before we stood zoom up, that if they wanted to become familiar with zoom, go ahead and get a free account, but don’t use your stonybrook.edu email.) When I changed the email, they sent an email to the stonybrook.edu account that I had to click to actually make the switch.

After I clicked in that email… the SSO issues finally went away and I could use my zoom account.

So – maybe this struggle is real for others. Hopefully someone else can learn from my issues.

Keep Teaching, Teaching, tutorial

Setting that aren’t easy to find in Zoom

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Zoom has a lot of features.

A

Lot

Some of them are not by any means easy to locate.  I mean, even not easy enough that I may have told you that apparently we didn’t have access to those features.

So here is the issue.  You need to create the zoom meeting room through blackboard.  That way it is tied to your course, and has all your students getting easy access.  But after you save the room:

Leave Blackboard.

Go to stonybrook.zoom.us and login back in

To find the option for preassigning break out rooms:

and click on Meetings and find the meeting room you just made.

Click on it’s name and then go to the bottom and find Edit this Meeting.

Towards the bottom, in the Meeting Options section, you will see Breakout Room pre-assign. This lets you create the rooms manually, or with a CSV file.

ALSO FOUND HERE:  What you need to stop ZoomBombs:

Anyone can share the link to the meeting.  It can even be a student in the class that is signed in from another device doing the trolling.  The only way to stop this is to enable the authentication profiles and force them to use a specific domain account.  We have done just that so you can add it to any of your meetings.  Simply go into the meeting options and check the “only authenticated users can join” option.  Please be sure to leave the domain as stonybook.edu.  I am including a screenshot below.  This will force them to use a stonybrook.edu email address and they can no longer be anonymous in the session.

image (11).png

Set a Virtual Background, Controlling who can share screens, send invites to meetings in different languages, etc:

Go to Settings on the left menu and dig through this area.  Note that some options are locked by “admin”.

Actually choose the Virtual Background:

This must be done in settings in the Zoom application. (Oiy!)  It will download a virtual desktop package to your machine the first time.

Leave some comments below if you find more “hidden” features in zoom!

 

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Using more than one semester’s echos in your current course?

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When you create the LTI link inside of Blackboard using the Build Content -> echo cloud link, this hooks your course to one semester’s set of recordings.  If you need to connect to more content from a previous semester, you can either go to your library, and add individual recordings to the current semester: (see below for second option)

log into echo360.org and go My Content to find the recordings you want to share.

when you hover over a recording with your cursor, you see three dots, click that and go to Share

Pick the current course and term and section that you are going to send this content to.

 

Select New Class , give it a name, optionally give it a date, and click Share.

 

or you can make a access link from the previous semester and add that to your current course:

Log into echo360.org and find the course you want to share in it’s entirety to the current semester.

Click on the older course, and then find the SETTINGS tab at the top. Click that.

Click on Access Links.  It will probably say there are no links.  Click on ADD LINK.

Select Public and then click and share the link as given. Put this into your current Blackboard course as desired.

 

Keep Teaching, Teaching, tutorial

Concerned about exams at home?

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Respondus has kindly fully opened up the licensing during these interesting times for their Monitor software, which uses a webcam for remote proctoring.

If you are concerned about how to have exams online, you will probably want to attend one of these webinars found here.

 

Here is an additional youtube video on the topic:

Keep Teaching, Teaching, tutorial

zoom recordings for educators, admins, staff and students

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