Jamf Blog
September 30, 2020 by Evan O'Malley

Learn Anywhere: Effective communication in any learning environment

Communication is among the most important aspect of education and is also the biggest challenge in remote learning environments. Jamf School developed a unique feature in the Jamf School Teacher app called Remote Class to increase student engagement and confidence in any environment.

Whether you’re familiar with the education sector or not, you’ve definitely heard tales of schools in the past few months trying to make the move to remote learning almost overnight. Many teachers were left to try and fend for themselves, but because of the abrupt nature of the switch, there are bound to be gaps in communication, even with the newest remote learning tools.

In this session, Dr. Dave Saltmarsh, Jamf Global Education Strategist, also discussed the idea of digital equity and the multiple layers involved in making sure that everyone has equal opportunities in terms of technology, support and accessibility. Not only in the school, but at home as well as in the community. This is why it’s important to go further than simply choosing devices for students and going beyond basics and substitution to create engaging, transformational remote learning. In the end, there needs to be purposeful planning for all learners’ readiness, needs and pace.

We then heard from Jamf Sales Engineer, Nate Hale, who described his experience with simply setting up a zoom call with his child and their teacher. Not only does the process include many back-and-forth emails and confirmations, but the process is completely separate from the iPad that his child had for learning. And for this cumbersome process to be happening multiple times a day is unnecessarily draining, even for the tech-savvy among us. And on top of it all, that teacher has 29 other students for which to try and maintain this process. It feels like too many superfluous steps for simple teacher-student communication.

That’s why Jamf has come up with a new feature in the Jamf School apps called Remote Class. Hale explained that there was already a solution within Jamf Pro called called Virtual Visits to solve a similar problem in healthcare. Patients needed a way to have on-demand access to their family, friends and healthcare professionals, which helped shape the conversation around developing the Remote Class feature.

Jamf got to work on adapting the Virtual Visits framework to be most advantageous for Jamf School and with options like messaging, students and teachers can now communicate through the Jamf platform even if they have Messages or FaceTime disabled on devices. The Raise Hand feature was also developed so that a teacher can add something similar to a Zoom Room with a recurring meeting linked to the Jamf School Teacher app which acts as a ‘virtual office hours’ for teachers. This makes it easy for students to get in touch with a couple taps and get the help they need more immediately, without the need to bring in parents or guardians for every interaction that needs to take place. Remote Class also makes it easy for teachers to break up students into cohorts in order to give all students (whether in class, at home or both) the most tailored learning experience for them.

But how does Remote Class work with third-party apps? In this JNUC 2020 session, Bartosz Gonczarek (or Bart), founder of the Explain Everything app, was able to show a demo of how the Jamf School Teacher and Student apps can work together to create a meaningful learning experience. With Explain Everything working as a virtual whiteboard, Remote Class can not only provide a space for non-text communication but can also help facilitate a space for more engagement, communication and collaboration.

Looking to learn more about what Remote Class or our Jamf School apps can do? You can still register for JNUC 2020 to see the full recording of this session and get all of the details.

Evan O'Malley
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