How Do I Get People To Sign Into a Zoom Yoga Class.
March 19, 2020 9:23 PM Subscribe
I am going to stream yoga classes on line while this crisis is on. I've set up a Zoom account and am unsure of what information to give to people who want to attend the class. I am also unsure of what I am responsible for on my end. The class is scheduled and I have a meeting i.d number. What else can I be aware of?
Response by poster: Medusa, that is an awesome name
posted by goalyeehah at 10:25 PM on March 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by goalyeehah at 10:25 PM on March 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
I don't know if you are emailing everyone? Because my sister and I have Slack accounts and we have added Zoom as an app so my sister starts the meeting in Slack and Slack messages me that a meeting has been started would I like to join?
posted by cda at 5:21 AM on March 20, 2020
posted by cda at 5:21 AM on March 20, 2020
I'd contact a few of your students and see if they can have a 5-minute "test meeting" with you. That makes sure your end is set up correctly and lets them test theirs. My wife set up a Zoom meeting and there were a lot of first-timers that were unfamiliar with the whole thing, so having a test meeting first eliminated a lot of issues that would have turned the real meeting into "Zoom Tech Support".
posted by mmoncur at 5:22 AM on March 20, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by mmoncur at 5:22 AM on March 20, 2020 [1 favorite]
Source: My partner and I have been hosting a 30 minute Zoom session daily for our church group since last Friday, with 6-12 participants per session ranging from early 30's to early 80's.
+10 for a trial run or two with friendlies, where you can experiment and learn what it's like from the other end
+10 more if your friendlies get on with laptops, iPads, and smartphones (and just dial-in, if you plan to support people that way). The zoom experience is different on smaller screens.
Have a stable landing page. In a pinch, this can be a Google Doc or similar, with the "publish to the web" url, or a web page that you have easy edit access to. The landing page ("Welcome to my online Yoga class") provides the zoom meeting link ad lets you add other materials (e.g. a PDF with exercises) easily. The former is important so that no one ever has to type or decipher one of those https://zoom.us/j/123456789 urls. (It also lets you change Zoom meeting rooms if you have to or shift to some other video technology at some point. Make the change in your landing page, and you're done.)
If you control the website (like your own wordpress or a friend's), focus on the url for that page. If you use Google Doc -> publish to the web or similar, use an url shortener to provide a friendly url. (tiny.cc lets you edit the destination for the friendly url, useful if you need to change things)
Give that landing page a stable, friendly URL: e.g. somesite.com/myyogaclass or tiny.cc/myyogaclass(I prefer all lowercase, run together. It's got to be easy to remember, and easy for someone to convey correctly over the phone).
Expect to spend a few minutes at the start helping people understand what they need to understand about the technology (here's where the test sessions pay dividends).
If at all possible, have a friend or colleague act as the "audience manager", in charge of muting folks, scanning incoming chat, etc., so you can focus on your presentation. My partner and I are on headphones, with separate laptops, 6 feet from one another, like this, but it would probably work to do this with a remote "audience manager". Bring the audience manager online at least for the second test session. The audience manager has to be prepared to "mute all" instantly if there's feedback or someone has a blender running in the background, and then selectively unmute.
Think through whether you'd like participants to be able to screenshare (probably not) or video-share (nice to see faces, but it makes the melding with your screenshare a little more complicated).
My partner the yoga student suggests that the yoga presenter have a wireless headset, so they can be heard by participants while demonstrating poses.
If you plan to screenshare, e.g. notes on a pose or a schedule, include that in the test session and note how the video thumbnail experience is different for participants. (Especially true for participants on a smartphone.)
If appropriate, consider adding a link to any notes to your landing page. This lets people see the notes on a second internet device (so they can focus on your video via Zoom) or print it out in advance.
For a session at, say, 2pm, get yourself and your audience manager online by 1:30pm and start the meeting, and invite participants to connect at 1:45 pm to kick the tires and get comfortable.
Expect that very few participants will get on early (in my experience; you may be able to set stronger group norms), and that quite a few will connect at 2:03pm.
There are two schools of thought on muting participants. The "silence!" school prefers that participants be muted by default by the audience manager, and then selectively unmuted by the audience manager as appropriate (to ask a question, say). The "friendly chatter" school prefers to let people control their own muting, which makes interaction more spontaneous, and a little bit of buzz is fun. This varies with meeting size to some extent. With a dozen or less participants who are disciplined enough to mute themselves if needed and keep the background blender/vacuum/parakeet off, I lean toward "friendly chatter", but with the audience manager ready to mute selectively or en mass.
You and your participants will get better at this. One participant joining for the first time on Wednesday noted how smoothly it all went. She missed the first session, last Saturday, where we had ten minutes of dead air due to a confusion about which Zoom account and meeting url to use (this was all on us, not Zoom), then stumbled onto the best way to use screenshare. Set your participants' expectations accordingly.
posted by alittleknowledge at 9:30 AM on March 20, 2020 [1 favorite]
+10 for a trial run or two with friendlies, where you can experiment and learn what it's like from the other end
+10 more if your friendlies get on with laptops, iPads, and smartphones (and just dial-in, if you plan to support people that way). The zoom experience is different on smaller screens.
Have a stable landing page. In a pinch, this can be a Google Doc or similar, with the "publish to the web" url, or a web page that you have easy edit access to. The landing page ("Welcome to my online Yoga class") provides the zoom meeting link ad lets you add other materials (e.g. a PDF with exercises) easily. The former is important so that no one ever has to type or decipher one of those https://zoom.us/j/123456789 urls. (It also lets you change Zoom meeting rooms if you have to or shift to some other video technology at some point. Make the change in your landing page, and you're done.)
If you control the website (like your own wordpress or a friend's), focus on the url for that page. If you use Google Doc -> publish to the web or similar, use an url shortener to provide a friendly url. (tiny.cc lets you edit the destination for the friendly url, useful if you need to change things)
Give that landing page a stable, friendly URL: e.g. somesite.com/myyogaclass or tiny.cc/myyogaclass(I prefer all lowercase, run together. It's got to be easy to remember, and easy for someone to convey correctly over the phone).
Expect to spend a few minutes at the start helping people understand what they need to understand about the technology (here's where the test sessions pay dividends).
If at all possible, have a friend or colleague act as the "audience manager", in charge of muting folks, scanning incoming chat, etc., so you can focus on your presentation. My partner and I are on headphones, with separate laptops, 6 feet from one another, like this, but it would probably work to do this with a remote "audience manager". Bring the audience manager online at least for the second test session. The audience manager has to be prepared to "mute all" instantly if there's feedback or someone has a blender running in the background, and then selectively unmute.
Think through whether you'd like participants to be able to screenshare (probably not) or video-share (nice to see faces, but it makes the melding with your screenshare a little more complicated).
My partner the yoga student suggests that the yoga presenter have a wireless headset, so they can be heard by participants while demonstrating poses.
If you plan to screenshare, e.g. notes on a pose or a schedule, include that in the test session and note how the video thumbnail experience is different for participants. (Especially true for participants on a smartphone.)
If appropriate, consider adding a link to any notes to your landing page. This lets people see the notes on a second internet device (so they can focus on your video via Zoom) or print it out in advance.
For a session at, say, 2pm, get yourself and your audience manager online by 1:30pm and start the meeting, and invite participants to connect at 1:45 pm to kick the tires and get comfortable.
Expect that very few participants will get on early (in my experience; you may be able to set stronger group norms), and that quite a few will connect at 2:03pm.
There are two schools of thought on muting participants. The "silence!" school prefers that participants be muted by default by the audience manager, and then selectively unmuted by the audience manager as appropriate (to ask a question, say). The "friendly chatter" school prefers to let people control their own muting, which makes interaction more spontaneous, and a little bit of buzz is fun. This varies with meeting size to some extent. With a dozen or less participants who are disciplined enough to mute themselves if needed and keep the background blender/vacuum/parakeet off, I lean toward "friendly chatter", but with the audience manager ready to mute selectively or en mass.
You and your participants will get better at this. One participant joining for the first time on Wednesday noted how smoothly it all went. She missed the first session, last Saturday, where we had ten minutes of dead air due to a confusion about which Zoom account and meeting url to use (this was all on us, not Zoom), then stumbled onto the best way to use screenshare. Set your participants' expectations accordingly.
posted by alittleknowledge at 9:30 AM on March 20, 2020 [1 favorite]
And more.
Mission-based Massachusetts is on the case, with some cheat sheets here.
Give yourself time to tune up your offering. Do the bare minimum the first time, then add a feature for the second session, another feature for the third, etc. Gentle in Yoga, and gentle with Zoom, too.
posted by alittleknowledge at 9:51 AM on March 20, 2020
Mission-based Massachusetts is on the case, with some cheat sheets here.
Give yourself time to tune up your offering. Do the bare minimum the first time, then add a feature for the second session, another feature for the third, etc. Gentle in Yoga, and gentle with Zoom, too.
posted by alittleknowledge at 9:51 AM on March 20, 2020
This thread is closed to new comments.
Make it a recurring meeting, then the same link will work anytime someone wants to join you.
Give it a name: instead of the default My Meeting, call it Quarantine Yoga with Goalyeehah so when it gets added to people's calendars the autofilled calendar info will be useful.
posted by medusa at 9:28 PM on March 19, 2020 [1 favorite]