3 Links about Online Teaching

Today’s 3 links are for online teaching: looking better on a webcam, having your students edit Wikipedia, and using a phone or tablet as a whiteboard in Zoom.

10 ways to look better on a webcam
YouTube video
Within the first 3 minutes of this short video (3m23s), Caleb Wojcik (AKA DIY Video Guy) gives you ten quick tips for improving your webcam setup. Even if you ignore the equipment upgrade suggestions, there’s good advice for framing, lighting and eyegaze. There are also more affordable ring light options now available (which we can attest do make a difference). Captions in English (auto-generated).

Using Wikipedia in the classroom
WikiEdu website
Instead of having your students write essays that only you will read, consider having them directly contribute to public knowledge by improving Wikipedia. WikiEdu has resources for how to use Wikipedia in education, including sample syllabi for other linguistics courses that have used Wikipedia, and tools you can use to manage your students and their work. Their staff are very helpful and friendly, and have worked with several linguists we know. For linguistics-specific resources check out the LingWiki slide set.

How to use a phone or tablet as a whiteboard in Zoom
Step-by-step written guide
The UVACollab team at the University of Virginia (USA) have put together this step-by-step guide for how to connect your phone or tablet to a Zoom meeting to work as a digital whiteboard, which is especially useful for drawing trees and other diagrams. Includes text and images. They have other Zoom support articles including setting up office hours in Zoom, and adding an audio transcript for Zoom.

Extra curricular
Some ~*helpful*~ advice from Andrew Ishak for getting your home office set up just right:

See you next week for a 3 Links post about linguistics for high school students.

Gretchen and Lauren

About Mutual Intelligibility

Mutual Intelligibility is a project to connect linguistics instructors with online resources, especially as so much teaching is shifting quickly online due to current events. It's produced by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch, with the support of our patrons on Lingthusiasm.

Mutual Intelligibility posts will always remain free, but if you have a stable income and find that they’re reducing your stress and saving you time, we're able to fund these because of the Lingthusiasm Patreon and your contributions there. 

Here’s where you can tell us which topics would be useful for you. The more requests we get for a specific topic, the more it helps us prioritize resources that will help the most people. 

Here’s where you can send us links (of either things you’ve made or have found useful) for potential inclusion in future newsletters. You can send a single link, or a set of three which may become a 3 Links guest-post! (With credit to you.) 

If you have other comments, suggestions, or ideas of ways to help, please email mutual.intellig@gmail.com