In March, 2020, teachers at my school, like hundreds of thousands of others across the US and around the world, suddenly had to switch from in-person instruction to virtual instruction. This required acquiring and learning many new technologies, including a virtual meeting space. Our district selected Zoom, which provided great training on basic functionality. However, as videos of zoom bombers in classrooms and lawyer cats went viral, the world quickly saw that there is more to know than basic functionality. We needed a guide for Zoom best practices for middle school teachers.

In education at that time, Zoom was primarily being used at the University level, and I was not able to find existing guides to best practices for middle school. That led me to research and create my own guide, with some of the key questions left as unanswered questions for my colleagues and I to think about and answer together as professionals as we tried and learned together from experience.

I chose to use Nearpod to create the training. Nearpod allows instructors to design rich lessons for both synchronous and asynchronous delivery including both content and interactive slides. It also allows users to create storyboards in Google Docs; then add the interactive elements and publish it through the Nearpod platform. The project was published and distributed with a library of resources that our school's teachers could access as needed as we worked to transition to online learning. The most satisfying moment for me was hearing a highly skilled colleague of mine referring another colleague to my training. View the Zooming in to Class Storyboard.