Zoom is a complicated application, with features and settings which may not be intuitive to find and use. I’ll cover a few of them here, but more information is available in the Official Zoom Documentation.


If you’re in a hurry, this 10 minute video covers the basics:



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Manage Participants

At 3 minutes in, the below video explains the Manage Participants button, including how to mute individual participants or mute all participants at once.



It may not be clear in the video, but a number of important controls, including student renaming and the waiting room, are available in the More button at the bottom of the Manage Participants pane.



You can mute and unmute all students with the buttons there as well. When you mute all students, you will be able to prevent students from unmuting themselves



You can also mute and unmute students individually by putting the mouse over their name and clicking Mute or Unmute.



More information is available in the official Zoom documentation.

Add a Co-Host

You can make a particpant into a Co-Host of your meeting, which will allow them to share management of the meeting, including muting students and managing the waiting room.


At the top of the Manage Participants pane, mouse over their name and click More -> Make Co-Host.


Screen Sharing

The below video gives a very brief overview of the screen sharing feature.



If you are unable to share your screen, even in a meeting you are hosting yourself, please see this article for help:


Zoom Screen Sharing Permissions

Attendee Annotation

Screen sharing includes an Annotation tool which allows you to draw directly on your screen, perhaps to highlight something for your viewers. By default this tool also allows other participants to draw on your screen as well, which can be a distraction.


To prevent others from drawing on your screen, click More -> Disable attendee annotation. This control will only be available after you have started sharing your screen.



The video at the top of this page provides a more detailed look at screen sharing and annotation. More information is also available in the official Zoom documentation.

Disable Annotation Entirely

If you never expect to use the Annotation Tool to draw or highlight on your screen, you can disable this feature entirely and never have to worry about students writing on your screen.


Visit the Zoom Settings webpage for your account and scroll down to Annotation. Turn the switch from blue to grey.



Remember: Doing this will also disable the Annotation tool for your own account during screen sharing!

Breakout Rooms

The video below shows how to create breakout rooms, assign students into them, and move between the rooms as a host.



That video glosses over it, but the Options button in the Breakout Rooms window has additional room controls. I recommend checking Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically, and unchecking Allow participants to return to the main session at any time.


Recording the Meeting

Except in certain cases, we ask that you please record any Zoom meetings which involve delivering instruction to a significant portion of your class. Please see the Guidelines page for more details.


When recording, bear in mind that Zoom will record the meeting with the layout you are using when you start the recording. That is to say, if you are in the Active Speaker layout, where the person speaking takes up most of the screen, then your recording will be in this layout.


On the other hand, if you start the recording while in the Gallery layout, in which each participant is shown in their own square within a grid, then your recording will be in this grid layout instead. This can be counter-intuitive; here is Zoom’s documentation on this subject.


Below is a very short video which describes how to record your meeting, and how to find the recorded video file after your meeting has ended.



The recorded video file will be named zoom_0.mp4. Each video file will be in a different folder, named for the time and date of the meeting, but all the video files will have this same name.


I suggest renaming the file to something more meaningful, perhaps classname - date.mp4, then uploading the file to a folder in your Google Drive, where you can share it with students who were not able to attend the meeting.