You may have heard a lot about Zoom meetings in the news recently. VB Schools uses Zoom meetings as part of a suite of meeting and collaboration tools. In addition to Zoom, we also use Google Meet and Schoology. No matter which tool is used, teachers are required to follow strict rules when video conferencing with students:
- students may not be recorded during a video conference for the purposes of playing the meeting back for other students. If the teacher would like to record the video conference, only the teacher should have their video on for the duration of the video conference.
- all Zoom meeting hosts (typically teachers) should use unique meeting IDs and passwords for each meeting. Do not use recurring meetings.
- all Zoom video conferences should be password protected.
- all Zoom video conferences should use the waiting room feature so that the teacher can admin only approved participants.
- when all participants have joined the meeting, lock the meeting so that additional participants may not join.
- don’t allow participants to share. Only allow individuals to share when you’d like them to.
- do not allow participants to rename themselves.
- do not allow the participants to chat unless you’d like them do interact for the lesson. Note that the host of a meeting can record the meeting (not for the purposes of playing the meeting back for other students) to keep a capture of all events during the meeting including all chats (including private chats). When doing so, it is recommended to let all participants know as this will help everyone to realize that private chats aren’t truly private.
- if someone in the meeting does misbehave, the host should kick them out of the meeting and, again, make sure the meeting is locked so they cannot rejoin. The instructor should connect with the individual who was misbehaving to make clear the expectations during a video meeting.
In addition to the rules above, individuals who prefer to be more security conscious can always join Zoom meetings without downloading and installing the Zoom agent software onto their PC.
As part of our ongoing vigilance on behalf of staff, instructors and students at VB Schools, we will continue to keep a close eye on Zoom as a tool used to deliver instruction. If the situation mandates, we will disallow the use of Zoom.