Zoom Adds Student Controls for Remote Classes

Good news for Zoom Education users! Zoom has considered requests from education teams’ admins and educators and created a set of new features to make the educational experience on the platform more convenient. Let’s take a brief look at all the new features. 

Improving Education

Here is the list of new features with descriptions:

• Virtual backgrounds and blur on Chrome OS – now all Chromebook users can change virtual backgrounds and apply background blur right in their Zoom apps. 

• Improved Breakout Rooms – the latest Zoom release lets session hosts share content that includes audio via Breakout Rooms with all the meeting participants. Using LTI Pro, educators can create new Breakout Rooms in advance using their course rosters and apply automatic assignments for students from different teams. 

• Anywhere polls – now educators can create polls that are available in a central folder that is accessible to participants from different groups. It means that there’s no need to assign polls to specific groups anymore. 

• Updated chat and waiting rooms – now Zoom chats support audio and video messages, while the waiting rooms make it easy to change participants’ names and 

• Asynchronous video – this feature provides students with more time to think on their responses and reply more thoughtfully. 

• Video messages – the updated video messages can last up to 3 minutes and stay in the out-of-meeting chat to let students share quick assignments or questions. 

• Participant renaming – this feature will help to identify users who join classes from shared devices, create anonymous groups, or split students into groups for certain tasks. 

Top Educational Tool

With such a huge list of educational features, Zoom is definitely about to become the best online education tool ever. What do you think about its current educational functionary? Is it versatile enough? Join the discussion in the comments and share this announcement with other Zoom students or educators.