Notes

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screenshot Farrago, Loopback, Teams

Notes to self as I try and teach myself to teach remotely. 

 

Powerpoint note, how annoying is Design Ideas. To turn it off you need to turn off all MS services in the privacy tab of the prefs. And relaunch app. And it didn’t seem to work for me. Back to Keynote – Export for me.

Teams

I am putting Announcements in 2 channels, then the next day removing them from the main channel and taking away the right to reply.

Got loopback working today. Dropping the Pass-Thru might have done the trick. This means I can mix in audio, Farrago in the meet today, with my mic.

screenshot Farrago, Loopback, Teams
Click for Big!

The Hands Up option turned up in Teams meeting for most of my class today. Good news was it seems to be in iOS as well as PC & mac.

Had a few more slides with photos today. These proved to be ‘laggy’ for some of the class. The children found that opening the chat and closing it seems to force a screen refresh and of the the slide shows up.

Tried having 5 minutes silent drawing in the meeting. I had my phone camera on my paper and some music in the background (loopback). It seemed to go down well.

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A few useful links for mixing audio and sending to Teams from a Mac.

How to share System Audio in Microsoft Teams | Bastian Kroggel

This is not about the pros and cons of Teams. This is not about whether it is better than Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, Rocket.Chat or Jitsi. It is about a single feature that is so widely used in Zoom that I did not even think a serious competitor can lack the function – sharing your system audio with your colleagues and audience while presenting something on your screen.

The use case for that is pretty easily outlined: Prerecorded videos, reruns of an earlier session, or just some basic background music – all of that exceeds the basic capabilities of Microsoft Teams in its current iteration.

Rogue Amoeba | Using Loopback to add audio to voice chat (VoIP)

Loopback enables you to combine the audio from multiple sources, including microphones and applications, then provide that combined audio to voice chat applications to be heard by all participants.

And

You won’t use the Pass-Thru source which is included by default, so remove it by clicking to highlight it, then pressing the Delete button.

I wonder if removing Pass-Thru makes much difference.

How to Send Computer Audio Over Skype or Zoom | Music Learning Hub

Audio Recording Setup | Preston Lamb Consulting, LLC

GitHub – ExistentialAudio/BlackHole: BlackHole is a modern macOS virtual audio driver that allows applications to pass audio to other applications with zero additional latency.

BlackHole is a modern macOS virtual audio driver that allows applications to pass audio to other applications with zero additional latency.

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Notes to self as I try and teach myself to teach remotely. See More lockdown learning for some sort of background.

Experimenting with Farrago & loopback to merge different audio devices into Team meeting, not successful so far, mic seems to lose volume & extra background noise. Seems like a good idea, can bring in other audio to meeting.

An online lesson that goes a bit wrong really effects my mood. Given the circumstances this is going to happen quite often. A lot of my eggs in one hour.

North Lanarkshire have decided that all Teams should follow a naming pattern, NLC School Name Class Name. This really spoils the readability of posts when I want to mention the class.

You can turn on text to speech in Minecraft, then you can listen to the chat while working. The music is quite relaxing too.
Children are bonkers.

Since I’ve not commuted for over 7 weeks I’ve not listened to a podcast. Tonight I walked the streets rather than the park, opened my podcatcher, a rather overwhelming list. I decided to listen to @jeremycherfas talking to @macgenie on micro Mondays. What a great choice.

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Notes to self as I try and teach myself to teach remotely. See More lockdown learning for some sort of background.

I remember when Apple Keynote came out I really liked it. For me the interface was simpler than PowerPoint and the files took less space. Now I am making a daily PowerPoint for our class meeting I’ve notice the file size situation is reversed. Exporting a keynote to PowerPoint is resulting in a smaller file.
I am still using Keynote as I am quicker and happier with the simpler UI.

For our meetings I am making, for me, quite long, 20 – 40 slide presentation. I get the impression that leaving out transitions and keeping them simple speeds things up. Pupils sometime get a blank screen, some of them have found that opening the chat and closing it sorts that out. I guess forces a screen refresh.

I try to keep the meeting moving along, were are doing an hour a day, covering a few different things each day. Given primary, age 8-11, I can’t expect a lecture to work. Getting the pupils to respond with voice as much as possible. Sometimes in turn, sometimes fire-at-will.

I am only getting around half my class of 24 turning up most days and imaging this would be more difficult with a class of 30.