Whilst we were all sleeping or enjoying being with people in a real-world setting, Zoom has been busy bringing in some neat new features to take your online events to a new level.
I’ve tried them out, so here’s my summary of five with a snippet of how I’ve used them. In no particular order.
Waiting Room Conundrums.
Have you ever waited in the room wondering when you’ll be let in? I’m sure you’ve multi-tasked whilst doing so, but Zoom now allows you to record a quick video clip of yourself alongside a slide or two and play this in the waiting room. There is nothing revolutionary about it, but Zoom does all the video’s recording, rendering and storing in its “cloud”, so there is no need to do anything else. I did one last week, which was pretty clunky, so I now prefer to record my video in-house and upload it to Zoom’s waiting room.
Avatar Heaven
This one has been around for a while, and I always thought it was a gimmick. Earlier this week, though, I used it alongside a countdown clock. During the break, I switched to the avatar mode by right-clicking and selecting avatar. Then, I fired up the countdown with a ten-minute timer.
Zoom has been busy bringing in some neat new features to take your online events to a new level
I left it showing for everyone to see and, when the time was up, morphed into the real Paul and continued unabated. It worked well. I’m a fan and have more hair.
Chat Facelift
The chat box can come alive with a large audience, and Zoom has given it a facelift. Each chat entry is not like a mini social media posting. You can change the text to suit it and add images. Then, others can comment next to the posting, give a thumbs up, or place a smilie next to your entry. Again, it is a bit gimmicky, but we tried it with a group exercise earlier this week. I asked them to do a little bit of research into a topic and then present it back on chat and “pimping” it up a little. They did; others commented and added all sorts of emojis and social acknowledgements—a great exercise.
Self-Directed Study
An interesting new feature is polling and asking the group to vote accordingly. Zoom will automatically set up breakout rooms with people in the room based on their choice in the poll. For example, what is your favourite pastime – sport, fishing, gardening, or none? Zoom will create breakout rooms for each pastime and allocate people to them automatically from their vote. I haven’t used this one yet.
Summary Comes Alive
This is my favourite. Hit the button when you start, and Zoom will monitor the conversation throughout the meeting. When you finish, Zoom’s AI will produce an excellent summary of exactly what was said and agreed upon with an intelligent action plan. It doesn’t merely recreate the transcript; that’s easy; it reads it and uses its intelligence to produce an insightful summary
AI Companion She wants to be your friend. Another feature to click on when you start and this will become your best friend. You can ask Zoom questions, and it’ll answer from its transcript reading. I used this earlier this week. One of the group joined us 15 minutes late from their break as she had an important errand to run. She asked Zoom to “catch me up”, and Zoom told her exactly what had happened in the meeting without interrupting the flow. Very clever. I like Zoom because these new features are easy to find and use, unlike its competitors, where you need a degree in advanced maths to figure it out. The best analogy is when you first took delivery of your new iPhone. It was just intuitive and easy to use
