Starting 22 February, our university is teaching the first two weeks of the new semester online due to the third Covid-19 wave in Vietnam. The different thing this time is that we will no longer use Zoom but other free video conferencing platforms such as MS Teams, Google Meet, and Big Blue Button together with our learning management system, Moodle.
While we are a little bit more confident with both synchronous and asynchronous communications and instruction, a Zoom legacy that will stay with us, unfortunately, is ‘Zoom fatigue’ (burnout associated with overusing virtual platforms).
I feel that the best way to lessen the effect, making our video conferences healthy is to take a break every twenty minutes or so, at least to relieve your eye strain.
In this post, I will share with you a PowerPoint named ‘Zoom Fatigue Combat’ that encourages video conference participants to do fun micro off-screen activities.
As mentioned above, a 20-minute break is strongly recommended! After every 20 minutes, I will spin a wheel of fruit and click our hero (Link – from the Legend of Zelda) to move to the surprise off-screen micro activities on the second slide.
In the micro off-screen activities menu, based on previous the spinning result, we will click on the video camera icon to reveal the one activity that we will do:
8 activities are listed below. You can always edit the activities by moving the video icon to another place and then insert your own.
After getting back to the conference room, I may invite one or two students to share their energy level and/or their follow-up stories. I also aim to complete all 8 activities in a 3-hour video conferencing session.
I hope that this interactive PowerPoint activity can generate something fun and healthy (at a micro-scale as each activity should not last more than 2 minutes).
Looking forward to reading your comments sharing other ideas for the micro fun screen-free activities 🙂
The Thankful Teacher
Further resources