Tatiana Rodriguez is an adjunct professor at Rutgers University, teaching students multi-media presentation skills, public speaking, leadership, social media, and interpersonal communication.
“Real-time interactions make StreamAlive a valuable tool for classroom engagement. I love to engage students in active learning and transformational student-centered experiences, and StreamAlive helps with that,” said Tatiana Rodriguez.
She’s also active in the Ecamm community (check out this training session she co-presented!) and is on a mission to help adjunct professors create engaging classes that students love and remember.
To get a sense of Tatiana’s teaching style, watch a recent training session she did for StreamAlive’s users on how to conquer your virtual stage fright.
A million challenges with teaching virtual classes
Tatiana delivers her virtual classes over Zoom, which creates a whole new set of teaching challenges due to not being able to read the room to gauge reactions and body language.
- Are my students paying attention?
- Is what I’m teaching resonating with the students?
- Am I explaining this concept clearly?
- How can I turn this virtual presentation into an active learning experience?
- How can I effectively field questions from students to ensure they are all being heard?
If you’ve ever taught a virtual class, you’re almost certainly nodding your head right now at the list above and can rattle off a dozen more challenges with virtual teaching!
Turn passive students into active participants
To counter these challenges, Tatiana uses multiple tools to ensure that her students are getting the best teaching experience possible. These tools include:
- StreamAlive to provide real-time feedback and engagement from the students
- Miro to allow active collaboration between the professor and students
- Ecamm Live to create captivating graphics and overlays, live stream, and produce videos.
“I use StreamAlive in my virtual teaching because it helps create an active learning environment within the meeting. It allows students to participate without leaving the current platform, making it convenient for those using laptops with limited screen space.” Tatiana Rodriguez
Combatting distractions and class disengagement
A challenge facing all courses and classes is distraction. While there are a range of factors involved, StreamAlive’s chat-powered interactions, from polls to word clouds to maps to spinner wheels means that everyone can get involved with minimal effort.
“Using StreamAlive’s polls, interactive maps, and text visualization tools I can turn my virtual class into a back and forth dialogue that compels students to pay attention and get involved.” Tatiana Rodriguez
For Tatiana, key to her success in delivering virtual classes is turning passive students into active learners by making it extremely easy for students to participate, while keeping student’s focus on her presentation.
“I’m a big believer that active learning produces better outcomes for students. Reading from notes or from presentation slides is a sure way to increase class disengagement as students tune out or forget the information, and StreamAlive is one of the tools I use to combat that.” Tatiana Rodriguez
StreamAlive helps give a voice to every student
Another aspect of virtual classes that can be a challenge is acknowledging individual student’s responses. In a physical classroom it’s easy for everyone to take turns or ask questions as there are physical cues on when to interject and when to let someone else take a turn.
Virtual classrooms remove some of the non-verbal communication cues that we need to help us feel heard. Using StreamAlive, Tatiana can equally engage and acknowledge the introverts, extroverts, and the ‘textroverts’ (those that like to use the chat to communicate!).
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“Acknowledging my students is deeply important to me as I believe that when they feel heard, they are building stronger bonds in my class. StreamAlive helps me to acknowledge all my students with its creative visualizations that are shared with the class from my screen. Whether it’s word clouds or thought bubbles or the magical falling tiles, it’s wonderful to see students open up and become an active part of the class.” Tatiana Rodriguez
StreamAlive automatically captures student questions
There is a balance in a classroom between making progress through the teaching materials for the class and responding to each student’s question. Additionally, if the students are being particularly chatty in the chat, it’s easy to miss a question.
StreamAlive makes it easy for Tatiana to track all incoming questions by using AI to pick up questions from the chat and curate them into a question bank. As she answers a question, she can check off the questions she has answered.
It also helps create a more equal classroom as people who might be too shy to raise their hand can ask a question in the chat.
“StreamAlive makes it extremely easy for me to acknowledge and respond to my students’ comments. This is important to me as it makes them feel heard and valued. I’ve found that I get a whole range of questions that I wouldn’t normally get if I asked students to come on camera and ask their question in front of the class. Any question that I’m not able to answer during the class I can get back to the student afterwards as StreamAlive’s saves all the questions in its reports.” Tatiana Rodriguez
Turn your virtual classrooms into engaging sessions with StreamAlive
StreamAlive works with all major meeting and streaming platforms. It works particularly well for in-person classrooms or hybrid classes using its browser-based chat.
Teachers can run polls, word clouds, interactive maps, rating polls, and spinner wheels during their class. There are even different ways to visualize the chat using thought bubbles and a Tetris-inspired falling tiles.
