By Sarah Brunskill
Zoom has replaced the real life classroom and added a little twist to this year. Every student at Williamsville East has likely used a breakout room and knows how to use that time to their advantage. To improve their design for teachers, Zoom has made some big changes that will affect your life in the “classroom”. Get ready because teachers are already able to update their Zoom accounts. Here are some things you need to know about these new updates.
First of all, teachers can now lock you into breakout rooms and control when you leave. This includes leaving the actual meeting. They can get rid of the leave buttons, ensuring that you are in the room working. If they really want, they can keep you in the room all day. Mr. Harrison mentioned, “When one of my students gets a problem wrong, I can put them in a breakout room for the rest of the day. They can then contemplate their life decisions.” If you think that is the only major update, you are sorely mistaken. Not only can they lock us in breakout rooms, but they can also hear our conversations in them.
Yeah, you heard me (and so do teachers). You now have to actually work on your assignments with your classmates. They can hear your conversations and make sure you are on task. So forget the mid-class snack sessions. That mac and cheese must wait. If you aren’t on task, teachers will know and can come into your room to get you back on task. Mrs. Pollard said, “I like this new update. After getting good gossip, I can go in and I make sure my students get right back to work.”
Sophomore Liz Crawford and her friends got busted for creating a teddy bear on the Build-a-Bear website and now they have 500 hours of community service. “It was worth it,” Crawford said.
“I watched one of my students make 1.6 million dollars selling an NFT of my head photoshopped on top of a liger,” English teacher Mr. Huber said. “But they thought they were buying one of Mr. Meyer. This school ain’t big enough for two people with the same haircut.”
I know. It’s bad. Even in a pandemic, the teachers are on us, and Zoom won’t let us break out (no pun intended). But it gets worse. Now, our teachers can see what tabs we are on.
Senior and East Side News Editor-in-Chief Philip Baillargeon was caught having 76 tabs open but all of them were blank. AP Lit teacher Mrs. Piatek thought he deserved his highly ranked GPA prior to this moment. To Baillargeon’s credit, one tab was open and displaying a Ted Cruz in Cancun meme, so at least that was somewhat close to what the class was studying about Dante’s Inferno.
This. This caused my midlife crisis. Think twice about playing your cool math games in class. Zoom gives teachers a notification when you leave a specific tab. Don’t even think about looking up answers to tests or assignments. The teachers will know. Madame Roberts said, “I think that this is a good update because it will ensure that nobody is cheating. Plus, I get to catch up on the latest Discord chat on Ensemble Stars Natsume Sakasaki.”
Zoom is on fire with the amount of chaos these changes will cause. We won’t even be able to stop, drop, and roll to stop them.
What does Zoom have against us? We just want to get through the year.
*Some additional changes to Zoom that you may also need to know include:
- Minor bug fixes
- Newly developed Bob Ross emojis for the chat
- Security enhancements
- Share and play video files directly into meeting
To understand these new updates and features, you must watch this video.
