Singapore started the heightened alert with the suspension of face to face lessons with my students from Wednesday May 19 to June 13. To continue with the business, we have to go online. I had the experience of skyping my students last year during the first ever suspension of lessons during the circuit breaker.
Past online experience
It was on a smaller scale last year as more clients chose to wait for physical lessons to resume after the circuit breaker. Last year’s online lessons were smaller in scale and thus served as a rehearsal for the big impact of this year’s heightened alert. This means having to move the stage from all physical to all online sessions in the shortest notice.
Abrupt news
With the abrupt news, I found out that the majority of clients did not want lessons to be put on a hold. As a result, I needed to prepare all lesson plans for an entire month speedily. Preparing all materials for the lessons scheduled for 6 days a week was no easy feat. That is considering that I have zero online lessons before the heightened alert came. Glad to say I am immensely relieved that Zoom became a lifesaving platform to pull off the feat.
Initial fears unfounded
I actually adapted so well to conducting interesting online lessons that I was able to overcome incessant worries about technology malfunctioning. Although hesitant about pivoting online due to having jitters about surviving entirely on technology in my daily work, I now look forward to live and breathe online lessons.
The new normal
It has been two weeks into online lessons and I am glad I am thriving with the new technology. I can only marvel at how easy Zoom lessons can be as pivoting online for safety will be the new normal especially with this heightened alert.Choosing to stay positive after the initial inconvenience, I start to see the advantages of embracing technology.
This is where you can start the lesson with all the conveniences of having all the lesson plans and materials stored in the laptop. This gives the teacher a myriad of lesson materials to access to at any given time. Above all, accessing your online files from home and sharing it across cyberspace ensures the safety for all students.
Zoom features
The best feature about Zoom is the lovely share screen function where you can use the highlighter to teach new concepts like countering terrorism. You can also use the add text feature to show the correct spelling and grammar and box it. There is a whiteboard to write virtual homework to make it feel like you are in a virtual classroom with your students.
Personal impact of heightened alert
Hence, I believe with knowledge of Zoom, I will be able to get through phase 2 heightened alert without disruptions to my personal business. Overall, being able to experience the effect of the tightened measures helps me to understand the rationale or purpose to keep all of us safe. I can only do this after adapting to zoom lessons and meetings speedily.
Alison online learning
I brushed up my knowledge of Zoom by taking a course on Guide to Zoom video conferencing. I started learning all about the basic and advanced features beyond what my prior knowledge of Zoom is. From the start, I learnt how to install Zoom to creating breakout groups and enable the waiting room feature. There are also interesting facts about security and zoombombing.
Zoom user acceleration
With the acceleration of video conferencing, Zoom went from from 10 million to 300 million users worldwide. As Zoom will be ubiquitous around the world for work and leisure purposes, we can only thrive with learning new technologies.
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