ZOOM - Getting Started with the Basics

How to Access your Personal Meeting Room

While there are a number of ways to access Zoom and to hold a Zoom meeting with your students, we in the Center for Academic Innovation (CAI) like to encourage those new to Zoom to use their Personal Meeting Room. Sharing your Personal Meeting Room to Zoom with your students is a quick and easy process. View the slides below and follow the quick steps! 

Waiting Rooms

How to Navigate your Waiting Room

Waiting Rooms are now enabled as the OTC default setting.  When the Waiting Room is enabled, students must be admitted to the Zoom Room by the Host.  At OTC, you do not currently have the option to disable the Waiting Room.  While this minimizes unauthorized and unwanted visitors, it does mean you need to monitor your Waiting Room closely and often to ensure participants are not inadvertently blocked from your meeting. 

Tips When Using Zoom

Zoom has many advanced capabilities, and the tech-comfortable instructor may make good use of them.  If "tech-comfortable" does not describe you, please avoid the following pitfalls. Zoom gives you the option to schedule Zoom meetings but that process can become complicated very quickly.

We recommend that you use the Canvas Calendar (see below for video tutorial), Sign Up Genius, Acuity, or other scheduling software that you are comfortable using to schedule individual or small group Zoom meetings with students. For regularly scheduled class meetings, post an announcement in Canvas and direct students to Zoom link the course. Having your Personal Meeting Room link or Join URL on the homepage or Modules area of your course will make it easy for students to find. 

Never Schedule a Meeting

Zoom Settings

There are a number of ways to customize and manage your Zoom classroom experience.  Here are a few you may want to try.

• Mute: Automatically mute participants on entry, and control whether they can unmute themselves
• Chat: Allow participants to send a message visible to all participants
• Private chat: Allow participants to send a private 1:1 message to another participant
• Auto saving chats: automatically save all in-meeting chats so that hosts do not need to manually save the chat later
• File Transfer: allow host and participants to send files through the in-meeting chat

These, and many other options, may be found under the Settings menu in your Zoom account.

Zoom Blog: Best Practices for Securing your Virtual Classroom Links to an external site.

We will begin this page with instructions on how to use the Canvas Calendar to schedule a series of Zoom meetings using the Join URL (aka Zoom link) to your Personal Meeting room. At the end, we will discuss some of the reasons one may wish to use the Schedule Meetings function within Zoom.

How to use the Canvas Calendar to Schedule Virtual Office Hours (or other faculty/student meetings) 

The Canvas Calendar can be your students' best friend when it comes to time management. If you are hosting small groups or individual Zoom sessions with your students, using the Canvas Calendar can save you lots of hassle. The Canvas Calendar allows the instructor to create appointment events using multiple days and times. For example, during the week of finals, you want your students to sign up for an oral exam via Zoom. During midterms create an appointment event in the Canvas Calendar and have your students sign up for a time slot during finals week. You will get a notification when each student signs up for the event. Take it to the next level and create an assignment - Sign Up for Oral Exam. This will help you keep track of who has signed up and who hasn't. In the Grades area, you can easily send an email to all the students who haven't completed the assignment. 

Document: Check out the Complete Zoom Quick Start Guide Links to an external site. Videos: Check out the CAI's Zoom Tutorial playlist on YouTube Links to an external site. Tutorials by Zoom: Accessing Your OTC Zoom Account Links to an external site. Sharing Your Screen in Zoom Links to an external site. How to use Breakout Rooms Links to an external site. Screen Share & Annotation for EDU Links to an external site. How to use Waiting Rooms to Manage Office Hours & Drop-In Visitor Times Links to an external site.

1. Log in to Canvas, and access your Calendar.
2. In the top right of the frame, click the + button, to Create New Event.
3. In the pop-up window, navigate to the Appointment Group tab.
4. On the left-hand side of the window, enter:
   • Name (i.e. "Office Hours", or "Mid-term Oral Exam"
   • Location
     • • if meeting virtually, this would be Zoom.  
       • You could use this same Calendar function to schedule in-person meetings.
   • Calendar -  From the drop-down menu, choose which course this Appointment Group should be created.
5. On the right-hand side of the window, enter the meeting logistics:
   • Choose the date, or several dates, over which you plan to hold the meetings.
   • Enter the time frame in which you will be available.
   • As you enter a date, an empty row will appear below.
   • If you wish to get rid of a date, remove it with the X on the far right.
6. Here's where the magic happens!  On the line below, enter "Divide into equal slots of _____ Minutes", and click GO.  Marvel as the chunks of time are split into smaller fragments!
7. Choose how you would like your students to interact in the meeting:
   • Are these midterm oral exams, or 1-on-1 help sessions?  Choose "Limit each time slot to 1 user".
   • More casual office hours, or a group project check-in?  Choose a greater number of students.
   • If meeting with whole groups, click the box to "Allow students to see who has signed up for time slots that are still available"
   • Let students sign up for more than one session, or limit them to only one.
8. Enter any relevant details or instructions you would like the students to know.
9. Click Publish!  The time slots will populate in your Canvas Calendar.

Advanced Scheduling

I feel pretty comfortable with Zoom, and I can keep track of lots of different meetings and links to those meetings...  Didn't you say something before about using the Zoom Scheduler?

Yes, I did!  Here's the thing, Zoom can sync with your Canvas Attendance and populate your attendance columns automatically. However, you MUST use the Zoom Scheduler for it to work.  In this case, you would: 

1. 1. 1. Log in to Zoom.
      2. Use the "Schedule a Meeting" function for each and every one of your class periods.
      3. Share that link with the appropriate group of students.
      4. Use the "Roll Call Attendance" feature as described in the Instructor Manual - 

Canvas Guides: Zoom Attendance