Zoom – Home Based Learning

Date: April 5, 2020

Yesterday was the first day I downloaded, and tested with using Zoom.

Zoom is a company founded by some Chinese guy who used to work in Cisco for many years.

As you can see from their stock price, they rise together with Covid19. Share price jumped up a lot.

Kay’s home Science tutor introduced this to me. So I decided to check it out and teach Kay’s Chinese home tutor to use this instead of Skype.

I think this tool is great. And it is free for 1-to-1 meeting. They only collect money for more than 2 person meetings (multi people meeting is free for 90minutes per day I think).

If you don’t know what is Zoom, and what is its capability, you can watch this Tutorial about Zoom. I am sure it is created by Singaporean, as the slang is Singapore slang.

https://youtu.be/ftfLTM4B6-g

Zoom is good because it support a nice Whiteboard as well as you can load pictures or PDF file locally or from your Cloud drive such as Google Drive and start writing on it.

Like this one, is one of Kay’s homework PDF. So, I load it up, pinch it to the size I want the other person to see, and the other person can start to write answer to it.

I first tried to load a photo. But Zoom somehow takes a long time to load that photo. My guess is my photo library is 670G big. So, I might take some time to go thru it. So it sort of hang there for a minute.

Later, I tried loading the photos from the Google Drive, and it was done super fast.

And if both are using iPad, you can use the finger to write or use the proper Apple Pencil to write it.

So the teacher on the other side can see the student do the exercise and watch his or hers hand writing.

And both side are able to Save it into the Photo Album on the student works.

Here is another video using Apple Pencil.

there are a lot of pen mode you can choose from too.

So, I think it is a great tool and no wonder their share price soars.

However, in my opinion, there are still a lot of bugs. For example you an add the same email address as contact a multiple time. I managed to add Kay as a contact for more than one time, and it show up multiple Kay in my contact. That is not right in terms of programming. But it is small bugs.

Of course, they need to deal with the privacy issue too. That is why their share price came down and slowly went up again.

But overall, for non-business use, it is still ok. Strongly recommended.

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