Attending Online Classes On Zoom App? These Updates Will Change Your Virtual Classroom

Zoom application is about to bring a virtual classroom seating arrangement among a host of new changes.

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New Delhi: Video conferencing app Zoom on Thursday announced a host of new features that aim to improve engagement with students during classes and classroom management.  In a different attempt, Zoom stated it will enable users to create a virtual classroom seating arrangement. In this, with a spotlight feature teachers will be able to highlight a group of students. They can spotlight up to nine participants at once for a focused group view. The new classrooms also allow users to drag and drop participants in ‘Gallery View' based on an order that they choose. It locks the gallery into a fixed arrangement that will not change when a new person speaks or enters the room. In the upcoming updates, teachers will be able to save their custom gallery layout as a virtual arrangement. Another feature that is arriving on Zoom is multi-pinning. With multi-pinning, any user may "pin" up to nine other users on-screen in their custom personal view. This is especially helpful for teachers and students who use American Sign Language because it does not automatically make the speaker appear in the speaker view. "Students who are deaf or hard of hearing can pin both teacher and interpreter on the screen for a more accessible learning experience," the company said in a statement. As a relief to teachers, they will be able to mute notorious students who may be causing some nuisance in the room. The host and participants will have to enable audio control for this. However, students still have the choice to not grant permission to unmute and attend the meeting. Additionally, Zoom will bring the "Original Sound" mode to let you disable echo cancellation and post-processing and get rid of compression. Zoom claims that this setting will also improve audio codec quality from 22kHz to 48kHz, 96Kbps mono/192Kbps stereo for professional audio transmission in music education and performance applications. WATCH | JEE NEET exams: Opinion divided over the postponement