Zoom staff guide

As the meeting organiser, there are two ways you can start your meeting.

1. From the Zoom Portal:
   • Sign into the Zoom web portal: https://city.ac.uk/zoom
   • Select Meetings from the left hand navigation.
   • Under Upcoming Meetings, select Start next to the meeting you want to start.

     

2. From the Zoom Meeting Client:
   • If your client is not open, you can search and open this from the Windows search feature.
   • Select Start alongside the Meeting name.

Turn on live Captions and transcript when the meeting starts so that your students and participants have the option of viewing the automated captions.

1. Select the Live Transcript icon from the meeting toolbar.
2. In the pop-up box, select Enable Auto-Transcription.

Meeting participants, including the host can use the Live Transcript menu to turn captions on and off, to view the full transcript and change the size of captions.

Screencast: Turn on live transcript and captions in Zoom

Teaching with captions enabled

Below are some tips on how to improve the display of the captions during your Zoom session.

• Practice: Do a practice run with live captions switched on. You will notice if your PowerPoint slides are too full and where your captions may obscure your slides. Re-organise your slides as required. 
• Speak clearly: Speaking clearly and at a moderated pace should result in more accurate captions. 
• Pause regularly: Take a generous pause between sentences. Zoom’s captions can start to fill up the screen. Take regular generous pauses to clear the captions. 
• Ask for feedback: Ask your participants to use the slower non-verbal feedback option to indicate if they are struggling to keep with the captions. This option is available via Reactions for desktop/laptop users and available via the More options for mobile users.
• Live Transcript controls: Explain to students and participants how they can hide the captions if they do not require them. Students can also switch off captions and view full transcript during the meeting if they find the captions are obscuring the screen and presentation. Students and participants joining the meeting via desktop/laptop can also save the transcript prior to the end of the meeting for review after the meeting.

To reduce distractions and to protect your privacy, you can switch on a virtual background during your Zoom meeting.

1. Select the arrow alongside the Start/Stop Video button on the the meeting toolbar to open the menu.
2. Select Choose Virtual Background.

3. Select the Blur option or one of the default backgrounds. You can use the plus icon to upload your own virtual background.

   

Screencast: Change your background in Zoom (and Teams)

The video below has been set to start at the section of the screencast related to Zoom.

City backgrounds

You can use a City background for your Zoom meetings. Download your preferred background from the links below and upload it as a virtual background in Zoom.

If you had the waiting room feature enabled for all or for external users, you will need to admit participants to the meeting. You will be notified of users entering the meeting room through the Participants feature.

You can choose to admit each participant as they arrive. For large Zoom meetings, select Participants from the meeting toolbar for a full view of which of your participants are in the room and which are waiting to be admitted. You can then choose to Admit all.

From the Participants icon you will also be alerted to non-verbal feedback provided by students during the meeting e.g. Hand Raise.

You can control how your students can interact with the chat feature.

1. Select the Chat button from the meeting toolbar.
2. Chat will open in the right-hand pane. Select the three dots alongside File.
3. In the menu chose the option of who you want students to chat with. The options available are:
   • No One
   • Host Only
   • Everyone Publicly

   • Everyone Publicly and Privately.

You can change these settings during the session. You might start off with chat available for Everyone Publicly and then may restrict chat to Host Only and then open up chat again later in the session.

1. If you did not select to Record meeting automatically in the cloud, select Record from the meeting toolbar at any point during the meeting.
2. Use the Record to cloud option to ensure that the recording records the participant view of the meeting and to save space on your computer.
3. Use the Pause feature to pause the recording during any sensitive discussions or while students are in breakout rooms.
4. Once the meeting has finished, select Stop recording.

   

• Meeting hosts and co-hosts can restrict student access to Chat, Share Screen and Annotate from the Security menu during the meeting.
• Within the Security menu hosts and co-hosts can also select to Suspend Participant Activities if you experience issues with any inappropriate content being shared by students or deliberate disruption by uninvited guests. This locks the meeting, enables the waiting room, and hides profile pictures. You can then remove any uninvited guests or move them to the waiting room.

• Select the Share Screen button on the meeting toolbar to share your screen, including any open PowerPoints. Once you have selected your PowerPoint, select Slide Show mode.
  • If you want to contain your PowerPoint in a window rather than in full screen, you can set the PowerPoint Slide Show to be browsed by an individual window.
• The meeting controls will be available at the top of the screen. This means you can manage participants and Stop Share at any time.
  • Select More to open the menu to view all of your Zoom meeting options.
• You can use the arrow icon to dock the controls to the bottom of the screen.

  

Once the Zoom meeting is finished, select End on the meeting toolbar and select End Meeting for all. This ends the meeting for all users and removes all students and participants from the meeting.

Automated speech recognition can be inaccurate. Captions or transcripts of your recordings may contain words incorrectly transcribed as profanities e.g. swear words or inappropriate words. Alternatively, you might find that the captions or transcripts on your recordings are censoring words with a row of asterisks which means that students relying on captions are missing key information.

LEaD are gathering information on the impact of profanities and censorship in recordings. If you find any examples, please raise a ticket with us via the LEaD General Request Form on IT Self Service Portal. 

Please include as much information as possible, including system used - Lecture Capture, Teams, Zoom, links to the recordings on Moodle and timecodes.