You are not new to the concept of a virtual office if you are an instructor or a school teacher. However, do you know how you can benefit from a virtual office? It is a great and fun way to introduce yourself to your students before they meet you in person. It will also help your students do more important things like contacting you, setting up consultations, reading your bio, and much more. Moreover, you can portray and emphasize whatever you want. You can also add a working canvas to your virtual office homepage and add an email signature.
Do you know that you can make a virtual office of your own? To make a virtual office, you need to take a simple graphic design in slides. Feel free to insert shapes, cut, and paste images on the web, etc. To be more creative with your virtual office space, you can hyperlink to various things. These links can lead your students to useful information that can be beneficial for them. For instance, one link can lead them to a Google appointments page where they can sign up for your office hours, or go to a digital version of a textbook. These links can have sources to useful course material or a welcome video that shows them the road map.
The best thing about a virtual office is that, unlike a physical office, it does not have to be static. You can be as creative and playful as sharing your goals. You can post announcements, links to modules that you are working on, a video summary of the course – and anything that you like. In this article, we will be sharing details about how you can make a virtual office.
How to make a virtual office:
We have gathered these techniques to make a virtual office as shared by Elin Melchoir and the team at the Office of International Education. Here are some things that you should keep in mind before getting started:
- Knowing the purpose of your virtual office: You can keep the virtual office to engage your students, help them find the necessary information, and appoint them in groups.
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Be creative
- You can install the Bitmoji app on your phone and make an avatar of yourself.
- You can search posture of standing or sitting to observe what you need.
- For the bitmoji, you can download it to photographs and afterward set the picture on your PC.
- NB: different spots recommend a Bitmoji Chrome expansion which gives too many access freedoms to Bitmoji – so you presumably need to uninstall it just after you use it.
Embed or Display Your Virtual Office:
The good news is – you can embed your virtual office or display it on your website. Moreover, you can use it as an email and add it as a signature in your emails. This signature will then link to the office on Google slides that your students can interact with. Here is how you can embed your virtual office in Canvas or website:
- Open your virtual office in slides.
- Go to files > click publish to the web
- Once the publish window opens, you can click “embed” then copy the code that appears in the box. This will be your embed code.
- Then go to homepage in Canvas > select layout, and set it to the front page as the homepage.
- If there are still any changes that you want to make, you can click edit to edit the front page and add them to your virtual office.
- Click on the lower-left content editing box and click on the icon that looks something like this: </>
- Paste and embed the code into the HTML editor.
- Lastly, click “save”
After this, you would be able to see your virtual office on the Canvas homepage. The process of embedding your virtual office on the website is similar to this. However, it might slightly vary depending upon your platform.
Embed your virtual office in the email signature:
- Open Google Slide > go to download under the file menu > and select JPEG or PNG image.
- Then, go to settings in Gmail, and click > see all settings.
- Go to the signature editor > use the image in the slide as your wish.
- Once the image is added, you can highlight it so that it is hyperlinked and becomes clickable.
- Likewise add a connection to an open rendition of the data and connections in your slide, like a Google Doc
- Try to look to the base and save your changes!
A virtual office is an excellent way to portray your business the way you want. You can keep the changes minimal to maximum – or however, you want. Make sure your students enjoy these sessions and you keep them creative.
