Zoom’s Pat La Morte on the Evolution of Online Education

welcome to z cast everybody i'm zeus caravala founder and principal analyst with zk research and i'm here for another one of my thought leadership z casts uh before we get started though i do want to give a quick shout out to eweek my media partner all my z casts are done in conjunction with the e-week e-speaks program uh today i have a gentleman pat lamorte with me who's the global education solutions lead for zoom and i thought it was a good time to have pat on because uh zoomtopia is coming up but also uh we're at the end of august or beginning of september and it's back to school week in fact uh my little niece katya i'm gonna say hi to her she went back to school today on day of recording so i think she's starting her fifth grade in toronto ontario so that's kind of exciting uh they're in person but i know other people that are still in hybrid some people are going virtual and so it's kind of an interesting time now for back to school so uh i do think you know pat it is back to school season uh you are the global education lead there are varying different opinions as to how schools should be conducted you know fully remote fully hybrid you know what are you seeing right now yeah and thank you for having me thanks for that great introduction i appreciate it uh it is back school season i'm having it here in sunny florida so we've been in session for about three and a half weeks already but obviously talking to schools around the world um is is different for every case right so i think a lot of schools have intentions of fully in person some are executing but i think it's still monitoring day by day so as i mentioned i have three high school age daughters and they went in fully you know in person using asynchronous when needed and they're ready if they change their minds because of an influx of numbers and so forth so so i think it's it's the best efforts of finding what works for your school for your culture for your community um but but i think all the above works i think the ultimate goal from hearing especially in the higher levels of k-12 is they love to find a way to offer hybrid as a parallel track where it's virtual so they can keep synchronous learning happening yeah and it does offer some new ways of learning you can collaborate with people from other schools uh i think things like that and i think uh you know one of the lessons that i kind of took away from last year is we really don't know what we don't know right we have delta varying creeping around out there so you could be live but you might wind up going back virtual um who knows when and so i think schools have prepared for that now one of the other lessons or i guess takeaways from last year is when the pandemic happened nobody was really ready obviously right so we jumped into remote education some did it well some not so well and i think the ones that did it not so well it was less about the tech right the tech works uh but it was more about readiness and best practices and things and so what were some of the major challenges that you saw schools face yeah yeah that's a great question thank you for asking that and i think i'm going to start by shouting out first of all the old institute out there and thanking them because they are heroes right yeah i mean i spent 26 years in the classroom as a teacher principal superintendent my wife's a teacher 12th grade and really they pivoted like usually overnight in most cases they took on 22 jobs they were a teacher they were temperature takers shield wiper downers monitoring traffic and paths and they still taught they still showed up and so i think to answer your question maybe it was about tech in some cases or the preparedness to handle the tech but more so it's the lack of time to train and onboard you know the support right so if your school didn't do anything with with zoom or any other program and just went right to zoom overnight you had to teach the next day so a lot of it was trial by error right clicking buttons and or in parallel gaining the support you needed but i also almost thought it was a tactical end of getting to where you needed to solve a problem it wasn't until about five six months in until you had breathing room to step back and say okay this works was it perfect no but it worked so here's what we're gonna do going forward right and i think what you said earlier was perfect and spot on is that we weren't expecting it but we now had time to plan so i would even challenge the audience to think of beyond covet maybe it's a climate disaster maybe it is a sports illness or an injury maybe it's just a plan b if you're not going to go fully to handle any situation that arises much like you'd have a plan in place for an emergency code red drill or you have a plan in place for a snow day or a hurricane day anywhere you live is just have this in place because it goes way beyond the classroom um so i see a lot of ingenuity and and really thinking outside of the box now that they can kind of step forward and say okay we're still teaching by inviting special guests into the room um maybe experts in the field that wouldn't necessarily travel for a 44 minute class or a 90-minute class if you will or maybe even the younger grades like your fifth grader fourth grade niece where she's gonna have an opportunity at one point to bring mom or dad to work to what they do well it'd be really cool if they were a firefighter if they were at the firehouse with an ipad and showing the students exactly what they do rather than sitting on you know a smaller chair telling them so you know i think the barrier was just preparedness you know you wouldn't enter a normal school year without pre-planning and and no one pre-planned this yeah and i and i've seen this movie play out before when schools first first started putting cabo programs in place right some of them did well some didn't well and the ones that didn't do it well really didn't know what to do with the tech until there were some best practices and we're starting to see that take place now now that being said though um i don't i think when eric you won your you know your ceo and founder was thinking of zoom i don't think he really ever imagined ten-year-olds using these platforms right and so it's a it's uh for you and i to use this in a professional type of setting is much different than a fifth grade teacher trying to use to teach a bunch of ten-year-olds right it's a tension spans are different their focus is different and i know to help with that zoom recently made some interesting enhancements uh one such was something called focus mode right and so can you describe how some of these enhancements help learning absolutely and i'm going to start by taking a half a step back if you will in that yes it was designed as an enterprise solution but the adaptability to this case i think is proven successful based on the simple user interface that we have i mean there's literally nine buttons or ten buttons to use it so it was i saw really really creative ways of kindergarten teachers holding up pictures of the button they wanted the press for associations right so yeah i mean here's the deal from the very beginning education has been top priority for eric and the whole team and so with such we made significant you know changes to help you know fit into that industry and also to innovate and be ahead of the industry so one mode that you mentioned was focus mode and focus mode is great it brings on two things one is a test quiz environment enhancement and the other is just for for privacy of students that may not want other kids to see their background and so what happens is when you press on focus mode it's something that the teacher or the instructor will engage all the students that are on the meeting cannot see each other they only can see the teacher now the teacher can still see all the students so it really does make that enhancement to allow the teacher to have better classroom management right and i think a similar uh functionality to go along with it is when your school signs up for the school licensing you can have a feature on the back end turned on that says hey i'm a school therefore if teacher a loses internet connectivity and doesn't regain within 20 seconds we're going to send all the students back to the waiting room so that they can't sit on an open call talking to each other so all the kids go back to the wedding room they get a little pop-up that says mr lemur lost connectivity he'll be right back as soon as i regain connectivity i let them all back into the classroom and everything is in a nice safe environment no that's interesting and uh um that actually makes some sense because i know some of the challenges teachers would have in fact i would talk to some of them and they would say that uh you know students pre-call or even they'd be pinning their friends and things like that instead of the teacher so right right well actually a very good point could you ask for features so pinning and spotlighting that's a great user it's education and the newer releases you can spotlight and pin up to seven participants so the difference is very subtle but effective spotlighting would be done by the host or co-host and makes it apparent on every screen so if i had a guest speaker in the classroom or if we had a panel discussion we would spotlight those four or five people so that anybody watching would see that pinning does the same effect but for my personal screen so perhaps i need an asl translator and i want to pin that person on my screen so that matter what happens that person stays prominently focused so i can see my interpreter as i'm trying to learn with that lesson all right thanks and then there's also some features in zoom that one wouldn't necessarily think of as educational like you've got polling capabilities for your events platform but i think some of those are being used in education as well correct absolutely so we have a few so a couple things we can live stream from zoom so a lot of schools are taking advantage of that for graduation football games softball games uh plays where they can now invite the broader community in maybe grandma and grandpa aunts and uncles to see these events excuse me the other one we have is breakout rooms so a teacher can actually take a large class of up to i think it's 100 people and break them into up to 50 rooms so we could have groups of students working with moderators we can talk into the rooms and so a lot of schools love that for group work for study review and then like you said polling so we have polling and i'm really happy to say that within the next two weeks we'll have advanced polling so a teacher can pull together uh up to uh 20 polls in a meeting 10 questions per poll and she or he can set those ahead of time before the lesson so if i'm planning out two or three weeks i can create the polls and pull them from the menu and students would have an interactive experience of answering the polls when they're done the teacher can share the results on the screen and then after the meeting in post hold the results to see who got which one right or wrong so now we have the ability to use it as a quick formative grade or it could be used for a bell ringer or something called a do now in the future you'll have opportunity to have up to six different types of questions matching true and false fill in the blanks and you can call those detailed reports to enter them into your grade book afterwards all right thanks now the the other area i want to touch on um is security and i think there's a pretty wide range of you know concerns around security that i think you know zoom's largely fixed or addressed or however you want to uh phrase it but uh is security or should security still be a concern for teachers parents and students i think from a audience perspective security should only be top of mind right because i'm trusting the education and livelihood of my students to the school so so i was expected to be and and even with zoom like you said you know back at the beginning pandemic we made some changes publicly to enhance security to where we are completely dedicated to be a safe environment a matter of fact we exceed expectations and put together a whole cso council to kind of moderate that and everything that's transparent on the website with guides on how to how to keep your students safe in a meeting but also keep your children safe so so yeah we take it very seriously as well and we also welcome feedback but we're going to transparently go ahead and exceed the expectations and provide support for parents teachers and schools to use all right thanks that that that that wouldn't sure be very helpful and and on that topic i would think of that as sort of a best practice um since you eat live and breathe education uh i know that that's your background long background in this as well can you provide you know a couple of best practices for students for teachers for parents as we embark upon this year and how to you know best maximize learning in this environment absolutely i'd love to i'm going to start with different personas let's start with parents first i would say for a parent make sure you understand zoom and you know how to use zoom so you can help your student navigate through areas where they might have a hiccup and and you can even open up your own free account make sure the students are using the account give it to them by school because it's protected under their firewall uh number one number two visit our resource center we can provide links after the show in the show notes to uh download the parent guide to using zoom safely with your your children uh students i would say definitely uh follow your teacher's protocol but to get familiar with the layout of zoom so that zoom becomes the complement to your lesson not the obstruction you won't be able to use zoom without thinking about it so that you can pay attention to the lesson and move learning forward teachers and administrators i mean i would say exemplar is the best fight like use it model it um really if you look at a program like zoom the platform it complements the way you teach it doesn't change it so if you enter a zoom meeting with 20 students let's say and you go into full screen mode the tools disappear you're teaching and by the way if you want we have some tools to help you engage and so forth and i would say to teachers too when you're in that environment don't be fearful when it comes down to it it still is classroom management it's just a different different playing field so i would say for teachers really take some time before school starts to learn zoom so that you can manage it as a classroom space that you would normally and last tip i would have in this and this is tried and true for many of teachers over the last year and a half is if you are dealing with a mixed modality where you have 12 students in front of you maybe eight or nine on online maybe they mix and flow based on you know quarantine is regardless teach to the online student for both it limits where you need to find things and the students in the room can still join the same zoom meeting and mute their microphones right this way it's consistent delivery methods so when that student has to go home they still know where to find everything so in the beginning like you said we all reacted and people were teaching here and teaching here and teaching here and teaching here and then they were getting mixed up by just nature of time of where things are located so just teach to the online student and let both respond appropriately and it'll make the workflow much easier thanks that was actually great the other best practice i guess i'll bring up here and i and i'll take this from the work i did with education back in in the early days of tablets is you need to think about these things as being able to change the way we educate you you don't want to educate the same way right digital media and you actually alluded to this if i can bring an expert in uh even if i'm back in a full in-person classroom if i can bring an expert in from you know maybe an astronaut or something from the other side of the country or somebody who's in a different you know in another country maybe represent something else culturally different or something that is a great way to augment in person by using this digital medium so i think one of the interesting aspects that platforms like zoom brings is it allows us to connect digitally even when we're you know socially distant and i think that's uh but but to do that and i and i don't want to pick on schools but i think schools have really been lagging in their ability to kind of innovate around the new mediums of you know technology that we have because you go to a lot of schools and they're still largely teaching the same way right it's instead of chalkboards and whiteboards but not a lot of action right yeah yeah no i agree totally right and so especially in the us we saw an influx as a response of a lot of of money from the government to go ahead and and help them through this crisis but even beyond i would say no matter where you live and where you operate a school i would take this opportunity the silver lining of this really horrible pandemic would that live through or we're still living through with the delta variant to understand what school you want to build right because there's two questions offer out to you any administrator listening any teacher listening one is when i say to you the words future competitiveness what comes up for your school your culture your community the second thing is is your school identity you have a legacy of alumni how are we going to protect our identity in a virtual world and what are you going to do differently to still feel that sense of legacy of generations before to learn from it and the reason i bring that up is very important because over the past year as well as teaching schools had to innovate for board meetings for graduation for you know homecoming week and by going through them with them excuse me the ones that were the most successful reimagined what this event could be instead of recreate it because when you recreate there's always going to be one or things that don't go over directly and then it seems like it's a failure oh my god it didn't work you know this doesn't work it's going to be horrible no no but if you say what could graduation look like where we are today what can we do to make it special for the students because it is a milestone in their life yeah when you do that it takes on a whole meaning of special and will be successful right and so what i would say to anybody out there is and one thing that came out of this is education has never been so accessible to so many personas so by that statement alone it really can't go back because now parents understand and maybe they're asking in certain schools and districts around the world does my kid need to be in that building for seven hours a day can i get this other program that's better and use you in the morning so i would be asking myself is what am i doing to keep my kids enrolled in my district right now and number two is when this pandemic happened then we all shifted it was a unilateral move a lot of the students came forward that never did before so what discussions are you having now with the board of education your unions to give you the agency to meet those kids where they're at because now they're shining right and what's that balance so those are a couple of questions i would ask is what school do you want to develop for it and here's the interesting part and i'll end with this piece on this question is we don't know so i would build my classroom environments to be flexible movable flexible because i don't know what that room's gonna be used for three years from now we're looking at schools that are working with us that are building brand new multi-million dollar buildings with no classrooms they're using zoom for the delivery of material and they're bringing the experience into the buildings with labs and so forth so that when the child is on campus they're working in more of a mentorship role with the teacher with hands-on application learning at home and what that's doing to level the playing field is whether i'm in class or not whether i can make it or not if i have a conflict my lesson's still being delivered by the same person with the same personality and same voice and i can go back and watch it over and over yeah that that's really interesting in fact uh um uh before i get to my next question i'm gonna get on my personal soapbox here please and uh if uh if ever the pastor taught us anything it from joe biden down uh all you government officials i hope you watch this we need a national broadband policy because we've got great tools like zun but a big part of the poor parts of these countries this country does not have uh adequate broadband and so that's something that i know in a lot of lower income areas uh they still don't happen so you know i think products like zoom really can equalize what's been an unfair educational system in some ways uh but um uh that's you know that's a whole different topic so no no but it's very important right so to approximate zoom right now are accessibility i say two because accessibility comes new packages availability and affordability of equipment but also connectivity yeah and and that has to be addressed it has to be brought to you through through e-rate through government programs they have to be able to do that because we're seeing communities around there getting heavily involved to make it happen on their own because educating children as a community community process yeah so i see schools working with their local cable companies broadband getting hot spots for students in some cases by the way this is the first time the parents have internet in the house so we have to support them as well yeah so all right well i'm gonna shift gears a little bit fat that you can see over my shoulder here uh zoomtopia september 13th 14th uh i'm pretty excited about it i've actually got a speaking spot there myself all right yeah more on hybrid work than this time but uh uh now uh for people watching this if they want to find out more about what zoom's doing in education i know there's a number of um educational both high red and in k12 and zoomtopia uh we're going to put up a slide in a second that shows some of those but uh why don't you describe you know tell us what to expect there absolutely it must be to go to event because i have it here as well so in education we actually have 10 tracks this year and they revolve around one common theme the common theme is returning to the classroom of confidence and imagining a future of education so from the keynote experience on day two we also have three external presentations by by partners of ours um which are very good about single um source messaging and emergency communications one around how to adapt zoom to your classroom um and then we have seven internal and what you're gonna explore in the internal is fascinating number one we really tackle the notion to give teachers tips and tricks on how to support students and parents around social emotional learning and we have a panel of three global ceos of non-profits that all were at least 20-year educators in their in their life as well and they really do a great job of outlining just tangible bite size tips and tricks to use to help because it's much much needed secondly we're going to talk about teaching anywhere so dr lance ford on my team is also still a teacher in oklahoma in his classroom he talks about in-person hybrid and virtual learning and really breaks them down to see what is a good fit for your teaching style at the end because of our our last event zoom academy a few weeks ago one of the most requested items from the audience was lance we'd love to see your classroom because you're a teacher so at the end we do a director's cut and we do a tour of his classroom and you can see his whiteboard around tables and how he uses it so it's behind the scenes tour showing you that this is not necessary but this is what works for him and and what each segment is in case you wanted to try to research it on your own uh and then another big topic is the learn anywhere and that's really what you alluded to before is that we now have the opportunity to bring people into the classroom but we have the opportunity to break down the walls of the classroom so we bring on uh two gentlemen that are teachers that use zoom to host digital field trips but also to bring other organizations into the classroom and you'll see uh also ways you can have your students tell a story because i really believe that we need to start paying more attention to the student voice it's very important so those are some of the highlights again our slide we'll put up has all 10 sessions listed and if you go to zoomtopia.com you can register if you're the first fifty thousand you'll have the full immersive experience and right now we're tracking about a third of the engagement already is educators wow that is uh that's a big number that's a big number so we're excited about that and they all live on demand so you can go in there we're using our brand new zoom events platform which we're excited to show off again uh allow you to create your own itinerary so you can pick all the sessions that you want and there's something for everybody there's a 120 sessions running in two days yeah well great and uh you know pat i think we're about out of time here i i do want to thank you though and i hope you understand the role that zoom is going to play here in educating helping our future leaders and innovators in this country uh get educated i think it's a very important role and it's good to see uh zoom and companies like yourself take it seriously so anyways pat thanks for joining me today uh and on behalf of everybody watching i hope all you students are that watch us had a great you know first couple weeks back at school uh and uh on behalf of pat i'm zeus caraval i'll see you next time on zcast you

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