Looking Back at 10 years of EdCamps Oh how the time flies, EdCamp Madison is turning 10 this year! It will be held Saturday, February 3rd at Sun Prairie West High School. Which can be found at 2850 Ironwood Drive in Sun Prairie Wisconsin from 8:30 am - 3:00 pm. Get more information and register here: https://sites.google.com/sunprairieschools.org/edcampmadwi/home I will always remember sitting in my first EdCamp opening session at the very first EdCamp Madison and having no clue what I was in for. So, I’d like to take this space to go over some of the basic rules of EdCamp. No One Will Pitch It for You EdCamps are unconferences. By this I mean that they have a blank slate of sessions for the day. There may be a few predetermined sessions, but ultimately the session topics are determined by attendees during the pitch & plan session that opens the day. If an idea gets pitched there will be a session on it. If a topic doesn’t get pitched, there won’t be a session on it. So, it i
Last year when we went 100% virtual virtual learning, my district was using Google Meet. This year, students have the option to attend face to face or virtually. To support those students who have chosen the virtual option, teachers are using the Pro version of Zoom instead of Google Meets. While there are many upsides to this, one major downside is the lack of free live closed captioning in Zoom. Zoom does have the ability to have an individual type in live captions, but we don't have the resources for that. There are also paid services that can be added to create live closed captions. But, I was looking for a free support option. To support those learners who would benefit from these captions, there are two workarounds for this.
The first is using the tools generated by Google. I use Google Slides and Pear Deck for all of my presentations. When presenting in Google Slides, you can turn on auto closed captioning in the presentation menu. The audio picked up from the microphone is then transcribed and displayed in the presentation view. So in a Zoom session be sure to share the screen with the slides presentation for students to see the captioning. Even if it is just a blank slide students will be able to see the captions. But don't present a blank slide! If you aren't going to prepare a set of notes on slides, just have images related to whatever you are discussing to provide some visual interest. And if you do record your session, your captions will be recorded, too. NOTE: only the audio picked up by the mic will be captioned. So, if students are speaking virtually or far from the mic, that will not be captioned.
Here is a video walk through of the process.
If you are presenting using Pear Deck in Google Slides, here's a short video of how to turn on Closed Captions. Note: I have had some issues having captions go away in Pear Deck when I draw on my SmartBoard this year. I'm going to need to investigate that.
Another option for Zoom Pro is the use of Audio Transcripts for Cloud Recordings. In Zoom Pro, users can enable cloud recording. Once this is done, they have the option to also turn on Audio Transcripts. This will transcribe the audio from a recorded session.
NOTE: this does not create live captions. It adds captions to the recording after the session has been closed. This transcription process does take a while. It could take hours or days. But once it is done, it can easily be shared out via URL. This only works for parts of the Zoom Meeting that are recorded to the cloud.
Here's a short video showing how to enable cloud recording and audio transcripts in Zoom.
As this is just my first week using Zoom as a teacher, I know I have lots to learn. I would love to hear any of your suggestions for increasing accessibility for all learners in Zoom calls.
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