How to Capture a Student's Game Board and Add Hebrew in Zoom

In response to my previous post, Games for Teaching Hebrew (or any language, really), lsachs wrote: Great ideas. Could you give some details on how to capture the board and add the Hebrew. Thanks. 

When my reply ended up being rather lengthy, I figured it would do better as a separate blog post.

I teach via Zoom, and Zoom has a feature that allows you to share your screen. It is the green

"Share" button in the middle of the tool bar. I open the image, share my screen, and once I am sharing, I am able to use the "Annotate" feature to write Hebrew over it. In this case, I wrote the Hebrew words for right, left, up, up and down so that my students could tell the class in Hebrew

which word they were reading in our Squares game. As the host, you find "Annotate" in the tool bar, which will drop down when you hover over the top of your screen (or wherever you see the green and red bar, notifying you that you are sharing your screen.) You must already be sharing your screen to see the "Annotate" option.

Class Dojo's Portfolio, where students submit their work.

If you are wondering how I got the picture of the board in the first place, you have a few options. I use the free app Class Dojo to receive images from my students and their families. (You can watch a 4-minute video introduction to Class Dojo here.) There is a little bit of set-up involved, but really not much and it is well worth it to have a convenient way to share, collaborate and communicate with students. Anyway, using the app, they are able to take a photo of their work and send it to me. I receive their work in real-time and can then share it on my screen.

Another option is to ask parents (or able students) to take a photo of their work with a smartphone and email the picture to you. The negative is that this can be hard to coordinate during class and often has to be done as homework.

If you don't want your students or their parents to deal with yet another technology, you can take a screenshot (a.k.a. print to screen) of your students holding their work up to the video camera. They DEFINITELY should write with dark-colored markers to make sure the letters are visible, and they need to be very steady. You will want to set your Zoom view to "speaker view" so that you see one student at a time in full screen. (Whoever is talking will show up, so you may need to mute the other students so that you aren't dealing with different students flashing on the screen while trying to take a screenshot.)

If you are unsure how to print to screen and you have a PC, watch this 45 second video: How to take a screenshot.
If you have a MAC, hold down these three keys: Shift + Command + 3 
The image should save to your desktop.