As the nation (and world) transitions to a new way of doing "life," new trends, both positive and negative, have begun to appear. By now, many of you have already heard of Zoombombing (a not so kind trend), and based on the recommendations of Zoom, and Blake has put the following security settings in-place. These security features are designed to provide greater control on behalf of teachers in online classrooms, prevent disruption, and help educators effectively teach remotely. We've streamlined the process on your behalf to make it more efficient and safer for you and our students as you schedule new meetings.
Blake will continue to provide the latest version of Zoom for Middle and Upper School students and employees via Self-Service on school-owned devices; please reinstall the application from Self-Service. For Lower School families, we recommend you continue to update the Zoom application on your family-owned device.
These default enhanced security settings are applied to meetings as of Sunday, April 5, 2020, for Blake employees, middle and upper school students who are using Blake Zoom Accounts:
-
Require a password when scheduling new meetings is enabled. This is required for all sessions going forward and cannot be overridden. You can set/change the password, and the password is embedded in a private and secure URL.
-
Waiting Rooms are enabled. This means that you will have to greenlight every participant as they enter your meeting. You will see names in the "Manage Participants" tab and will have the choice to Admit or Remove them. You can admit them individually or all at once.
-
Mute participants upon entry are enabled. This will ensure that students will not call attention to themselves when entering a class late.
-
Private chat is disabled. Restricting participants' ability to chat amongst one another while the meeting is happening will cut back on distractions and prevent people from sending/getting unwanted messages during the session. Chat to "Everyone" is available, and ensures students can still interact with the teacher as needed.
-
Only the Host Can Share Screen. Hosts still can allow participants to share their screen during a meeting and edit their default settings to enable participants to share in all sessions.
Recommendations for Students, Employees, and Families
- Do Not Share a Meeting Link. Keep invites private. Do not share a link to a teleconference or classroom on an unrestricted publicly available social media post. Your teacher will provide a link to you in Canvas (MS/US) or via the landing page in the lower school.
- Use randomly generated, one-time meeting IDs. Don’t use your personal meeting ID. It’s tempting to copy your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) and use that for every Zoom meeting. A better approach is to generate unique IDs for your gatherings. It takes a little more work, but the beautiful thing about setting up unique meetings is that you can make them recurring, you can set a specific password just for that meeting, and it’s easy to delete and replace it if you need to redo the invitation. Just click the Schedule button on the Zoom main screen and leave the Generate Automatically option selected under Meeting ID.
Best Practice Recommendations for Lower School Families Using Personal Devices
- Update to the Latest Version of Zoom. We encourage you to update to the latest version of Zoom, which continues to provide additional security and safety tools built-into the application.
More Information:
0 Comments