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 Portal.
   • 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.

Participants and hosts can enable live captions an/or transcript during the meeting. We recommend that the Host enables captions and transcript to ensure that the speaking language is set correctly.

1. In the meeting toolbar, select the Show captions button.
2. Select the speaking language, then select Save.
3. Open the arrow alongside the captions button and select View full transcript and the transcript will display in a panel on the right.
4. Participants can view the live transcript by selecting the Show caption button and selecting View full transcript.
   • If users do not have the Show captions button on the meeting toolbar, open the More menu and drag and drop the Captions button to the meeting toolbar.

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

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. 
• Enable captions & transcript: Explain to students and participants how they can enable the captions and transcript during a teaching session on Zoom.
• 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 React for desktop/laptop users and available via the More options for mobile users.

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 Video button on the the meeting toolbar to open the menu.
2. Select Adjust background & effects.
3. Select the Virtual backgrounds tab.

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 St George's backgrounds

You can use a  background for your Zoom meetings. Download from the link 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.

There are 4 available video layouts when no one in the meeting is screen sharing: Speaker view, Gallery view, Immersive view, and floating thumbnail window. When someone is screen sharing, you can use Side-by-side mode or view the screen share with Speaker view. Any of these layouts can be used in fullscreen or windowed mode, with the exception of the floating thumbnail view.

Other video layout controls include rearranging the gallery view order, pinning or spotlighting up to 9 participants' videos, hiding non-video participants, or stopping all incoming video.

Find out more

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.
2. Choose 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 button to pause the recording during any sensitive discussions or while students are in breakout rooms.
4. Once the meeting has finished, select Stop recording from the meeting toolbar.

If you do not have a Record button on your toolbar, open the More menu and drag and drop the Record option to the meeting toolbar. Then select the Record button and choose Record to cloud.

• Meeting hosts and co-hosts can restrict student access to Chat, Share Screen and Annotate from the Host tools menu during the meeting.
• Within the Host tools menu, hosts and co-hosts can also select to Suspend Participant Activities if they experience issues with 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.

Find out more

1. Open the files and webpages that you want to share during the Zoom teaching session. Close anything that you do not want to share during the Zoom teaching session. 
2. Select the Share button on the meeting toolbar.
3. Select the Window that you want to share.
   • If you plan to share multiple windows e.g PowerPoint and webpages, select the first window that you plan on sharing and then hold CTRL button on your keyboard and select the other windows you want to share.
4. Select Layouts & options to combine your video and shared screen in one frame to create a more engaging sharing session. 
5. Navigate to your open 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.
6. 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.
7. You can use the arrow icon to dock the controls to the bottom of the screen.

Find out more

Once the Zoom meeting is finished, select the End button 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.