We are trying to move our classes of 40+ students from physical presence in the classroom to Skye for Business with screen sharing PowerPoint.
We tested it internally with 15 people and the whole thing bogged down. We suspect that is because all users are internal… long story (everyone internal must run through a common Citrix environment). None of us are particularly tech savvy… I can scrape by and tinker with things.
Anyway, we suspect that if we have just one or two internal users (instructor and assistant) but the students are all external, it might work fine. However, we don’t have 40+ people to run a quick test of this theory.
My thought is maybe 40 dopers might help out. Other suggestions welcome. Thanks!
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If your school uses Microsoft office 365, the Teams environment probably works better and you can easily share files like ppt.
Make sure there are clear explanations on etiquette. Like everyone muting the mike and a way to ask questions (maybe through the chat function, after which you can give them the floor).
If it doesn’t go the way you’d like, consider recording your explanation of the PowerPoint (many possibilities, even in PowerPoint itself) and publishing it on stream (also office 365). Then have the skype meeting for Q&,A.
I think pretty mush all students use O365 but I wouldn’t expect any kind of proficiency of them. They need to be able to just click a couple things and get the content.
Push it onto a stream… like? Twitch or YouTube or something?
I didn’t know about the recording function in PP. That might be useful.
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Stream is an app within O365, where you can upload video’s and let your students stream the material.
Teams is fairly easy. If you put a meeting in your Outlook time table, you can click on teams as a location. You can than invite the students…or copy and paste the link that is automatically generated.
I’d link to the 5 minute video that showed me how to do this, but it’s in Dutch and only available within the environment of my organization.
For what it’s worth… this time last weak I had little idea of what we were going to do. Now I’ ve uploaded a handful of streams and had a few dozen meatings with both students and colleagues. Biggest group was about 25 students. Things work surprisingly well…
Why do you have to screen share? Put the presentation on a school site that everyone can download or email it to all the students. Then just have a regular teleconference.
My work is moving to have a lot of meetings on Skype and the first 15-30 minutes of every meeting is getting it to work. Just email me the presentation and have a call in number. New is not necessarily better.
Have you tried the webinar function? That’s designed for larger numbers of users and the 1-2 webinar host(s) would be the only ones whose screen would be shared?
No no no, use Zoom. They’re helping people get set up fast with the transition to online classes. We’ve been using Zoom for 4.5 years for all our meetings, which do include classes of up to 50 people (well, we’ve also just begun using one of their pricier products that allows up to 1,000 in 2020 too, but that’s more of a lecture-only rather than interactive meeting then) and aside from a scheduling snafu that keeps happening to a couple of my coworkers, it works really well. You can have everyone with their video on, share your PowerPoints, record the meetings, mute people, chat etc.
Best of all for you, their free plan that allows up to 100 participants just had the 40 minute time limit removed for the duration of the pandemic.
No personal experience, but from a local forum I know of many teachers who are having success with Zoom.
I can confirm that Skype and Teams are best used for 1:1 interaction. Due to the current situation, Microsoft has recommened that people do not use meetings to arrange a call within Teams. It is better to do this outside of the calendar.