Zoom features for sign language teaching

[Zrinka]

Hello guys, I am new.  Hope you are well and safe.

I teach British Sign language at the University of Cambridge. I am looking into how to improve the Zoom experience for my students. I feel that the lecture needs to be better set up. The BSL teaching is a visual method and I currently use a gallery view because this is the only way students can see me. I tried other settings but with 15 students on my screen, it does not work. Ideally, I would like myself to be seen in the middle of the gallery view and a bit enlarged. We all depend on signing with each other on the main screen and seeing each other well enough. Another option is to set the view to Speaker so your participants could see you in a bigger view but not useful really. Sign language is very much interactive. I tend to design activities on the main screen where everyone can see each other as well as breakout rooms but in breakout rooms, this takes much longer. I am also working on a research project related to an online hybrid version of sign language teaching. We are not talking about the BSL only but other sign languages and there are 600 of them around the world. So, online teaching via Zoom, which I found much better than Teams, can help us to reach out to a global community.

Hope to hear from you

Zrinka

[J-Zoom-ATL]

@Zrinka I completely understand and Zoom is constantly improving to create a better experience for all of our users. 
I would suggest submitting your suggestions via https://www.zoom.us/feed so that we can evaluate your requests. 

I do have one suggestion however. I would suggest utilizing the custom gallery view feature so that you can drag and drop users where you need them. You can place yourself in the center (although not enlarged) but at least it would provide a more centralized and interactive setup display. You can also arrange students having more trouble in a better viewing location if need be. 

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/4413866054285-Setting-a-custom-gallery-view-order-  

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