While in Denver, I missed two days of lecture for my sophomore inorganic class. Normally I would have just skipped them, but I ended up with some pretty tough time constraints and was left in a pinch of really needing to cover some material. I decided that I couldn’t just skip the classes, but I also knew that attempting to make them up outside the normally scheduled time would be next to impossible. So, I decided to hold class remotely. I had a positive experience using Zoom for an online course for alums during our January Interim session, so I decided to use that for my class. Getting up at 5:00 am MT to teach an 8:00 am EST class was not a lot of fun but I managed. The students did not have any problems getting signed into my Zoom conference (even the LC of VIPEr can use it). At first the students were excited about this different format. A few of them got together in a common lounge. Many were in their rooms. One forgot and showed up to class. But the entire class did show up which honestly did surprise me. My hotel did have good wifi and class ran fairly smoothly. I asked them all to mute their microphones which helped. Zoom does have a feature to allow participants to raise their hands, and when I called on those students they unmuted themselves and asked their questions. Zoom also has a group chat feature where students did type in some questions. I think some of them liked the private chat feature which enabled them to ask me a question without being identified to their peers. I had about 10 questions using the private chat and 8 or 9 of them were what I deemed to be worthy of sharing with the class, which I did while protecting the student’s anonymity. So, was Zoom perfect? No. The biggest issue I had was my Power Point slides. I had saved my presentations to Dropbox which Zoom was able to access. I think the problem arose from the fact that I was running Zoom on an iPad. So, all my fancy animations were just a big mess. But Zoom does have a feature that allowed all of the students to see whatever I wrote on my screen, so I made it work. All in all I was quite happy with how class went. Next time we get a big snow storm, I feel confident that I will be able to hold class from the comfort of home. And based on the way this ‘spring’ is going, there is a good chance that will be Monday.