Assessing and Maintaining the Health of Your Devices
When many students are participating from various networks for a course session, there are bound to be glitches and other technical difficulties. Follow these suggestions to avoid such problems:
- Test your connection before class by using Zoom with a friend of family member. Practice a few times with someone at the location where you plan to attend an online lecture to make sure the connection is steady.
- When you're in a large lecture mute yourself and turn off your video. This will help reduce the possibility of frozen screens or shaky audio. When in a seminar or discussion class it’s important to keep your video on if at all possible. Use the raise your hand feature or chat room to ask questions when needed.
- If at all possible, have a back-up device on hand if needed. Download Zoom on a smartphone, tablet, or another laptop before your lecture starts to give you an alternative option in the case of technical difficulties.
- Make sure to keep your PC, laptop, tablet, and/or phone updated. Delete old files to allow more memory capacity.
- Avoid having multiple programs open at once. Close everything you don’t need when attending an online synchronous class or when in an online meeting.
- Give your laptop a break when possible. Do not keep your device plugged all the time while you're using it, over time this can cause your device to give inaccurate information about how charged it is. Charge your device when low on battery, then unplug your device when fully charged.
- The following articles provide instruction for keeping your device healthy and at maximum performance: