We’ve all been there since March of 2020, and we know how awkward it is to join that first Zoom meeting. Students, teachers, and professors alike have all grown to predict the meeting rooms of black screens and text-names, yet no webcams. Student engagement for the last year has degraded because of circumstances beyond our control, but can you blame them? They’re throwing themselves into classrooms from their beds, home offices, and living spaces. So since they don’t have the incentive to drive to school, get dressed, and be at their A-game in the classroom, they’ve instead resorted to hiding their faces and removing the personality from the Zoom classroom.
This does not need to be the case, however! There are a bunch of different things that meeting platforms such as Zoom have that can offer variety in the classroom. Examples include custom backgrounds, chat parameters, raise hand functions, and a bunch of other things that can let you express yourself and participate like you were in a normal classroom and encourage students to have their cameras turned on. Hopefully in this guide for today, we can show you some of the things that you can do as a host on Zoom to make it worthy of your time.
CHANGE BACKGROUNDS
First things first – we want to address the elephant in the room: your room. Whenever you join a Zoom meeting for the first time, your bedroom, office, and household are the default background every time. Your entire class can see every detail of your home simply because of your web camera, and that can be an incentive to not turn it on in the first place. What if I were to tell you that you can make anything into your background on zoom? You have the ability to make anything into a green screen meeting, so you don’t need to always show off the room you’re joining class in. This is how to go about it.
- Open Zoom meeting
- Then, in the bottom left hand corner of your screen, hit the little arrow next to your camera, then click “Choose Virtual Background” like so:
- Next, you’ll see a screen looking like this:
- Click the plus button in the top right hand corner of your screen. This will allow you to select an image off your computer that you can use for your backdrop while you are in the zoom meeting. As you can see, I downloaded a picture of Mars off Google and made it my background. How did I get here? Zoom Magic.
Side note: Zoom might ask you “would you like to download the virtual backgrounds update?” Press Okay! It’s free, awesome, and it’ll turn some heads at your next Zoom meeting. Make sure that you pick something that expresses you!
REACTIONS:
Now what if you are in class but you’re not sure what feels appropriate to emote on? In real life, after all, we can emote to what we find in lectures by smiling, applauding, or even giving a nod in approval. If something clicks with us in a class. How would you be able to do that in an online meeting? Well, it’s not as simple as doing it in real life because the people in the meeting do not always have everyone else’s camera on full display. The resolution is to do the following. Reactions. Truth be told, this is just a miniature tool that some classes have that is highly underutilized, and we thought it would be fun to explain its utility with a brief ‘how to do’ Here are the steps:
- First, click on the reactions button in the toolbar. (note, some classes might not have this function enabled
- Next, select the emote that you want to have represent a reaction in class. There are a bunch of options, like a thumbs-up when you wanna say ‘I understand’ or a laughing face when you want people to know that you find something hilarious!
You might even notice that there is a Raise Hand function! That is something that might come in handy if you want to find a moment to interrupt a conversation without actually interrupting people. Once you click on one of these, however, it will show it activate in the top left hand corner of your screen, like so!
Not only can this boost engagement in the classroom, but it can also help folks that might be a little shy when it comes to interrupting the class to make a comment. It allows the students or professor to say, ‘yeah, this attendee is listening!’ without actually seeing them directly emote or say anything.
Also: If you use a Chromebook to host a Zoom meeting, these features may not be available.
CHAT TIPS
Have you ever noticed the chat feature in Zoom? This is a great way to interact with others in the meeting! If you want to chat and have everyone in the meeting see your message, make sure the chat is set to “everyone”.
As the host of a Zoom meeting, you have the ability to control whether your meeting participants can privately chat with each other or only post in a public fashion. To change the chat permissions when you are hosting a zoom meeting, open the chat, select the three horizontal dots on the lower right corner of the chat box, and select which permissions you would like to implement.
ZOOM SECURITY FEATURES
As the host of a Zoom meeting, you have a myriad of security features available to you. You can select whether or not people need to be in the waiting room before joining the meeting, if you would like them to have the ability to chat during the meeting, or even if they are allowed to unmute their microphones.
To see these features, click the Security icon on the bottom of your Meeting screen. Select which features you would like to use.
If you’re new to Zoom, these features will be very useful as a meeting host. So the next time you have to host a Zoom meeting, never fear! You’ve got this!