Zoom Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices
Use your Zoom personal link
We recommend using your Zoom personal link. Think of it as your Zoom office.
Go to the Highline Zoom page, log in, and click on Profile in the left navigation menu. To the far right of "personal link" click on customize, and name your Zoom room link. Just give this to your students. There is no need to use the Zoom button in Canvas or create a Zoom meeting. (When you create a Zoom "meeting," Zoom creates a brand new url. It can be hard to keep track of which Zoom room you're supposed to be in. So, yes, just use your Zoom personal link.)
A note about ZoomBombing: Some people with nothing better to do have been appearing in publicly available Zoom rooms then sharing their screens to show porn. While there are several different ways to minimize the chances of this happening to you, the easiest is to:
- Enable the Zoom waiting room Links to an external site.. Everyone who comes to your Zoom office will be placed into the waiting room. You can choose to let them in or not. If you let them in, and they behave inappropriately, you can kick them out.
- Disable screen sharing for everyone but you by default. In your Zoom office, you'll still be able to give permission to participants to share their screens, it just won't be turned on by default. Go to your Zoom settings page Links to an external site., scroll down to "Screen sharing," and change "Who can share?" to "Host only." To allow others to screen share in your Zoom office, click the up arrow to the right of the green Share Screen icon, select "Advanced sharing options," and under "Who can share?" select "All participants." This change will only apply as long as this session is running.
Waiting room option
If you are using Zoom to conference with students one-on-one, use the “waiting room Links to an external site.” option.
This will allow you to continue working with a student privately (think FERPA, confidentiality), while other students wait their turn. It’s sort of like how that line of students forms outside your office while you finish answering another student’s questions. You can even customize a brief message to those in the waiting room to let them know you’ll be with them shortly.
From "chat" or from the "manage participants" pane, you can message those who are in the waiting room.
Share screen/whiteboard
You or your participants can choose to share a screen, any program/app you have open, a whiteboard, or a second camera.
Mute participants/raising hands
With more than 10 people in a Zoom room, it can get noisy, especially when you include everyone's background noise. We recommended muting all of your participants Links to an external site., and asking students to raise their virtual hands Links to an external site. as they would in class. Students can unmute their mics to speak.
Breakout rooms
The host of a room has a "breakout rooms" button on the Zoom toolbar. Click it to create as many breakout rooms as you'd like. You can then automatically assign participants to a breakout room, or you can assign them manually.
Participants will see a pop-up inviting them to join. When they click the blue "join" button, they will be moved into a breakout room.
Participants have the same tools in the breakout rooms as they do in the main room. They can chat with others in the breakout room, and they can share their screens, for example. One additional icon they have is "Ask for help." By clicking it, they can ask the host to come join their group. You will see a pop-up saying that a participant has asked you join their group. Click the button to be whisked to their group.
As host, you can click on the breakout room icon to "broadcast" a message to everyone. It's like standing in front of the room, and saying, "Can I have everyone's attention for a minute?" All of your participants will see a pop-up on their screen that displays your message. The message does allow for a limited number of characters, so you may have to send more than one message if your message is lengthy.
You may join any room you'd like by clicking the breakout rooms icon. In the pop-up, you will see each of your breakout rooms with a "join" button next to it.
When you ready to close the breakout rooms and bring everyone back to the main room, click the breakout rooms icon again, and select "Close all rooms." All of your participants will get a 60-second countdown so they have time to wrap up their discussions. If they are ready to leave before that 60 seconds is up, they can click the leave-breakout-rooms button.
Participant feedback icons
At the bottom of the Zoom screen, your students can click on the "Reactions" icon to clap or give a thumbs up.
When students click on the "Participants" icon, the participants pane will open. At the bottom of the participants pane is a row of icons.
The coffee cup signals the need for a break. The participant can click on the clock to signal that they are away.
You can see the icon displayed in the top left corner of the participant's video window. If you have the participants pane open (click on "Manage Participants" at the bottom of the Zoom screen), you can see the icon to the right of each participant's name.
Zoom reports for attendance
In your Zoom account Links to an external site., click on Reports. Click on "Usage." Change the date range to whatever you'd like to get downloadable reports from each of your Zoom sessions. Clicking on the number of participants in a session will show you who was in the session and for how long. Click "Export" to get a downloaded spreadsheet.
Keep in mind that not all of your students--for many reasons--will be able to attend your live Zoom session.
You are encouraged to record the Zoom session to your computer Links to an external site., and then make the recording available to your students. (Our contract with Zoom allows for a very tiny amount of cloud storage, so please don't choose the record-to-the-cloud option.)
If you upload your Zoom recording to Panopto in your Canvas course Links to an external site., you will be able can see who watched the recording.
Pro Tips:
Check out the Zoom keyboard shortcuts Links to an external site. for Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS (e.g., iPhone).
Students can change the language of the Zoom Interface (and so can you) Links to an external site..