Remote learning can help faculty delve deeply into how their students learn and engage
with instructional materials. With the right tools, remote learning can assist faculty
in prioritizing interactions with students, enabling necessary course adjustments.
In cases of emergency, inclement weather, or a scheduled absence — it can help provide
all-important continuity or recover lost class time.
Zoom Video Conferencing at SUNY Plattsburgh allows you to create live meeting sessions
that your students can join. These can be optionally recorded, and therefore also
useful for lecture capturing. Even if you don’t plan on hosting a live session, Zoom
can be used to create a lecture using your webcam, sharing your computer screen, or
both.
The resources available on support.zoom.us are very useful and can help you get started. the Technology Enhanced Learning unit
within Library and Information Technology services is also working on a video series
surround teaching with Zoom.
Note: It is imperative that properly captioned recordings of any sessions are ESSENTIAL parts of the process: students who are unable to take part in the real-time activity
must be given an opportunity to review what happened.
Did you know that your Cardinal Cloud email supports emailing your classes quickly
and easily? Class lists are automatically generated each semester and can be emailed
using the following formula: [dept abbreviation][course number][section]@plattsburgh.edu
For example, a Computer Science course (CSC) with the course number 123 and a section
of B can be emailed with: [email protected]
If you need to email a previous or future term, you can append the term code with
an underscore to the course. For instance, if I wanted to email my course for Fall
2019, but the current semester is Spring 2020, I can send a note to: [email protected]
Note that these lists are only available for one previous or one future semester.
Google Hangouts is a chat and meetings product built into Google’s G Suite for Education,
the system that powers your Cardinal Cloud email account. You can login to this system
by visiting https://hangouts.google.com. Its main feature is as a chat platform, but can also support making phone calls
and video conferencing with Google Hangouts Meet located at https://meet.google.com. You can quickly jump into a meeting with others who have a Google account by going
to that URL, or schedule a meeting on your Google Calendar and choosing the meet component
within the calendar entry.
For more information on how to live stream a Google Hangouts meeting, visit their
help article title “Live stream a video meeting.”
Google Meet or Hangouts Meet, located at https://meet.google.com, can be used to make phone calls, video conferencing and also be used to create quick
meetings. You can quickly jump into a meeting with others who have a Google account
by going to that URL, or schedule a meeting on your Google Calendar and choosing the
meet component within the calendar entry.
Note: Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Google has made a their Hangouts Premium service free for Educational institutions
through July 1st. Allowing additional recording features. While live captioning can
be turned on, recordings are not automatically captioned.
Having an active account at SUNY Plattsburgh also allows you access to Office 356,
Microsoft’s subscription service that gives your access to the Microsoft Office applications
on the cloud, as well as the downloadable desktop applications.
All active faculty and staff, as well as students, have an educational subscription
to this Office 365. You retain some cloud-based features as an alumni/retiree/emeriti.
To login to Office 365, simply enter your SUNY Plattsburgh email address on the login
screen and you will be forwarded to our central authentication single sign on systems.
Google Drive can be a great way to share files with your class. You can setup a special
drive called a Shared Drive that lets you add everybody in your class for collaboration purposes. If your main
goal is simply to provide information to your students, you can create a folder for
your class anywhere in your main Google Drive area and share it out with all the students and provide them only with view access. This is great if you
have videos, PDF documents, Word documents, or other materials you want to provide.
Students can also create documents or directories and share them with you, who, as
the instructor, can add them to your own drive and easy grade on the run.
Moodle is linked with Google Drive (Cardinal Cloud Drive) and can easily be used as
a source for files you wish to attach to your Moodle site. Additionally, this is the
default location that Cloud Recordings from Zoom are stored.
PowerPoint has a really useful feature for recording your slideshow. If you have slides
you want to use for a lecture, you can record yourself speaking through these slides
which will also show the laser pointer or any annotations you use on each slide. In
addition to saving your voice as an audio track of the presentation, it saves your
slide timing too. Microsoft has a how-to article labeled Record a slide show with narration and slide timings. These records can then even be exported as a video.
Note: The presentation, if saved as a video, should be posted to YouTube so it can be automatically
captioned, and that the YouTube video can readily be embedded in Moodle pages, URLs,
labels, forum posts, etc.
Since every SUNY Plattsburgh email account is technically also a Google account, you
can use YouTube to upload videos of your lectures to share with your class. You can
do this with videos you’ve created with Zoom that you’ve saved locally on your computer,
with PowerPoint presentations you’ve exported as video, or any other format you wish
to upload. Faculty/staff have the YouTube services turned on to use with their SUNY
Plattsburgh accounts.
Google Chrome Remote Desktop is a tool that allows you to quickly and easily connect to your office computer from
a remote location. An installation is required on your desktop computer ahead of time,
the SUNY Plattsburgh Computing Helpdesk can help you with this process (email [email protected] or call 518-564-4433). Once completed, you can use the Google Chrome browser on a home computer or campus issued Chromebook to remotely connect to your desktop computer and have access to all of your files
and applications.