Teaching Characters Online Using Zoom Whiteboard

In the beginners class, I can see that when providing both Pinyin and characters, students do not look at characters at all, at least for many of them. Pinyin is the easier way to access. However, because of the importance of recognising characters, I teach characters from early on. Lately, I have discovered Zoomwhiteboard and how I can incorporate it into my class.

I separate the characters into smaller parts (if it’s compound characters) (lots of them), scattering them around on the whiteboard (see below). I also have the characters (non-separable ones) on one side and ask the students to find the little parts in the character and pull them together. For me, I think the challenge is the first time to let students get used to the whiteboard (it is interactive from their end, too).

Screenshot from the zoomwhiteboard during class

When I asked my students to start dragging the character parts, most of the students responded that they could not drag them. I think I could do it beforehand by testing it out from the student's perspective on Zoom so that I could better explain to them how to use it in the class.