Best Practice During a Live Lesson or Meeting

All mics (teacher and pupil) off and only on when someone wants to ask questions or teacher wants to speak – cuts down on all the noise;
Consider adopting an all pupil cameras off approach - this seems to really help ease the burden on the speed of everything which can otherwise cause things to delay and be a bit stilted. It also means that, for pupils in houses where there aren’t endless rooms, they can base themselves wherever they want. You can still see who’s there on screen in any case;
Try only turning your cam on when talking (and sometimes not even then) – turn it off when setting a task to get on with;
Throughout the lesson, have ‘meeting chat’ open on the right of your screen. So much easier to keep up comms with pupils and respond to queries (and quieter) when it is live flow chat. You do this by clicking ‘show conversation’ on the menu bar (the menu bar where you can blur background, mute your mic etc.);
When you have live chat running you can reply to pupils on there, but more complex questions were easier to address by switching mic back on and giving the answer;
When pupils are doing the task, use chat to check in on them and remind them you’re still there and happy to help etc;
When you ask pupils questions it is better to say a name first e.g. ‘Lucy – what did you think of….’ It’s too easy to slip into normal class mode and say ‘what did we think of…..?’ and then you have 10 pupils all talking over the top of each other to answer…or them all sat there in silence waiting for someone else to take the lead!
If you have shared screen during live lesson – remember to turn it off when not needed! It is really easy to leave it on without knowing it is.