Zoom Rolls Out New Features to Help Teachers Manage Students During Remote Classes: All You Need to Know

Zoom's latest updates include add-on features for Zoom Chat and Waiting Rooms.

By Apoorva Sinha | Updated: 12 April 2022 16:31 IST

Zoom Rolls Out New Features to Help Teachers Manage Students During Remote Classes: All You Need to Know

Photo Credit: Zoom

Zoom has announced latest features in response to the educators

Highlights

Zoom has unveiled new features for Education users
The new features include virtual backgrounds, polls, and more
Zoom users can now rename the participants of a meeting

Zoom has unveiled new features for its Education users in response to requests from teachers and administrators. These features span Zoom's chat and meeting offerings, including Virtual Background and Blur for Chromebooks, Anywhere Polls, and Breakout Room enhancements. The new features are designed to engage students in submitting homework assignments, as per the company, and are available in the latest update. Some of the new features will be rolled out later this year. Here's a look at the new features on Zoom

Virtual Background and Blur for Chromebooks

This feature adds a virtual background and blur for Chromebooks. You can avail the feature and change the settings straight from the Zoom app. You can follow these simple instructions to change your background on Chrome OS.

Breakout Room enhancements

Breakout Rooms feature also received enhancements in the latest release. It now allows meeting hosts to share content with audio with participants in Breakout Rooms, adding the ability to share videos with audio. With the LTI Pro integration enhancement, educators can populate Breakout Rooms from the course roster. This can be used to assign Breakout Rooms in advance and then automatically sort students into different Rooms.

Zoom Gets Avatars Feature for Virtual Meetings: How to Use It

Anywhere Polls

Anywhere Polls will allow polling content to live in a central repository that can be accessed from any meeting on an account instead of being associated with a particular meeting. This feature will be available later this year. In addition to these features, Zoom has also announced a few additional features for Chat and Waiting rooms. These include sending audio and video messages in Zoom chats and the ability to rename the participants in the Waiting Room. The company claims that asynchronous video allows users the time to consider their responses and then record as needed to provide thoughtfully crafted responses.

Zoom Update Fixes macOS Bug That Keeps Microphone on After Meetings

Users can click Video at the bottom of the chat client and record up to a 3-minute video message that goes directly into the out-of-meeting chat channel. It is useful for situations such as students submitting brief video assignments. Also, renaming participants before they join the meeting can be used for attendance taking where students may be using shared devices, for creating an anonymous student group, or for affirming gender identity.

Asus India's Arnold Su joins this week's Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast, to talk about how the PC maker is planning to grow its presence in the country. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.