Man! It’s hard to believe that summer is almost over and a new school year is starting in a few weeks. Well, I’m sure that most people are not that bummed about teaching or learning from home, but let’s be honest here, you’re missing a little bit of uni life. Spending late nights at the library, catching up with friends in the cafeteria, joining events, and partying hard!
How about you still get to do all of these things but online? Grab your students’ attention and meet in a virtual university/school using oVice.
1. Create a motivating learning environment
Making your virtual classroom look like the real one will definitely not only be impressive for the students but it will also reset their mindset to actually study as they’re feeling like they exist in a learning environment.
You can pick a classroom/school/university layout image and place it in your virtual space. Adding fun interactive elements won’t hurt either, so don’t hesitate to add those or even let the students do it themselves so they feel that they’re contributing in decorating their virtual classroom.
2. Get Familiar with your audio & video settings
There’s nothing worse than hearing alien noise and when your voice keeps breaking up while giving a lecture.
It’s always best to check your microphone settings beforehand and the same goes for your camera settings. If there is a lot of stuff going on in the background, you might want to blur it out or add a gray effect. You can even install Snapcam and add a classroom-fitted background filter.
What we also recommend is to dedicate a spot in your house, away from the noise, possibly your wife and kids (pets are allowed just because they’re really good at lightening things up and breaking the ice), to avoid any background or distracting noise.
3. Make it inclusive
When you’re doing a workshop or an online tutorial, you certainly don’t want everyone to be muted or talking at the same time. It’s either awkward or messy.
Creating a comfortable setting for the students will allow them to contribute more to the lesson. You can come up with a set of rules that are for fun and organizational purposes.
For example, before talking/unmuting, raise your hands to ask for permission to speak and anyone who raises their hand and talks, they get a clap from the rest of the classroom.
Another way is to play around with the layout and divide it into areas like A, B, C which will help in group discussions (Separate meeting rooms work just fine too)
4. Make time for breaks
Students are easily distracted. When they’re studying from home, the distraction will be doubled. Beware.
Dedicating a 3 to 5 min break every 30 min is essential to restore energy for both teachers and students. It would be enough time for taking a bathroom break, grabbing a snack, answering their texts, or moving away from their desktop to get some air. It’s simple but significant.
You can even create a break area that’s similar to a cafeteria or even better, add a floor that’s only used for casual chit-chats and coffee breaks.
5. Experiment with your virtual classroom usage
If it’s a classroom by day, it can become a library by night.
oVice allows you to instantly customize your virtual space and save your edits so you can go back to them whenever needed. So if you set up your online space for giving lectures, you can change it to a social event venue, a conference hall, a library, or even a park, just by changing the customization elements. Don’t be shy to go beyond just holding online classrooms. oVice lets you go creative and crazy so you can create an online learning world that is fun and educational at the same time for your students to always come back to.
About oVice
oVice is a virtual space where you can easily talk to others around you simply by moving your avatar and bringing it closer to the other party’s avatar. The closer you approach someone, the louder voices are and the farther you move away, the lower voices get. This gives the feeling of talking in a real physical place. Not only can you share screens and make video calls on the spot as needed, but you can also place down lockable private rooms and interactive elements. Since its launch, August 2020, it has been used more than 7,000 times.
Website: https://ovice.in
Take a demo tour: https://tour-en.ovice.in
