I was delighted to do another Comic Art Masterclass with a school this week, I'm always delighted to. It's my bread and butter, bring on more schools. But oh, if only more schools were allowed to use Zoom, rather than the problematic Microsoft Teams, which I find so user-unfriendly it's unbelievable.
My problem - and if there's anyone out there who can solve it, I'd be overjoyed - is that Teams doesn't allow me to see a full size image of myself, the presenter, in the way that the kids see it. On Zoom this is called Speaker View, and one can easily alternate between that and Gallery View, to see either a screen-full of kids or oneself. Teams only offers, as you can see in the image above, a postage stamp sized picture of me, positioned really unhelpfully at the foot of the screen. This means that, in order to check out my own image, I have to look down, so that instead of making eye contact with the kids and the camera, I appear to be looking at my feet in a shifty way.
Here you see, on a Zoom screen (above), that even in Gallery View, my picture remains up top near the camera. I raised this problem on Facebook, and someone asked why I need to see myself anyway?
The answer is that I work on a flipchart, I look at the kids work, and I hold artwork up to the screen and even do some drawings up close to the screen, all of which necessitates me moving back and forth. Which means that, without a 'monitor' view of myself, I can't be sure whether the kids can see the bit of art I'm holding up, whether it's catching the light badly, whether they can see the bit of the flipchart I'm drawing on, and even whether my head's getting cut off, which can easily happen.
This is before we even get to the problem of greenscreen, which works easily in Zoom but doesn't seem to be available to Mac users in Teams, and to the new problem that occurred with this mid-week class whereby the kids faces weren't all visible! You can probably see in that picture up top, taken before most kids had joined, that I was only able to see 9 of them as photos, the rest remained as initials at the foot of the screen. This meant that getting a show of hands needed to be done by using the 'hands up' button, and seeing their artwork as we went along was impossible.
Quite why Microsoft Teams has to be so badly designed and inflexible, I can't see. Zoom has managed to deliver all the things a presenter needs, and is good for the audience to use. Teams seems to doggedly make itself awkward, inflexible, and user-unfriendly at every possible turn. And, of course, schools and their local councils have, largely, allowed the use of Teams but don't allow Zoom. No, I don't know why either.
If anyone knows how to make my own image bigger on Teams, to ensure all the kids faces are visible, and to make the green screen function work on a Mac, I would be delighted to hear from you.
UPDATE Friday Jan 29:More fun with Microsoft Teams this afternoon, with another school. First up I couldn't join cos I wasn't a member of the school team. The solution? They had to send me the email and the password of one of the teachers. That's how security works.
Then, pleasantly, I finally made greenscreen work. Hooray. But wait - where's my flipchart gone? Yes, Microsoft Teams' version of virtual backgrounds only works by isolating the speaker, not actual greenscreen. Which meant my flipchart, and any piece of artwork I tried to hold up, vanished. Could this piece of software be any more rubbish?
Yes, it turns out it could. Cos, now I was acting as one of the teachers, I started getting the "Waiting in lobby" notifications which appear, unhelpfully, slap bang in the middle of the screen. This happened twice while I was trying to draw a kid's face, and had to just wait until it cleared.
And are there more faults with this dreadful program? there are. Cos for half a dozen kids, whenever I tried to "Pin" their image to draw them, I just got a screen of (ironically) green. Use Zoom, schools. Please! Just. Use. Zoom.
My next classes, all on Zoom, are listed below. See you there.
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