EdtechGuides: Zoom staff guide: Prepare for Zoom session

Set up polls

If you want to check understanding and ask multiple choice questions during a Zoom session, you can create polls in advance of the meeting.

Go to the Zoom portal: https://city-ac-uk.zoom.us/
Select the Meetings tab from the left-hand navigation menu.
Select the relevant Meeting Topic to open the meeting settings and scroll to the end of the page.
Select Create alongside the title No polls added to create a new poll.
You can launch a poll during the session from the Polls button on your meeting toolbar. The meeting organiser can also create new polls during the meeting.

When scheduling a meeting you can select to allow Alternative hosts to create or edit polls.

Screencast: Zoom Polls

Pre assign students to breakout rooms

As a meeting organiser, you can organise your students into breakout rooms when scheduling the meeting. This can be useful if students are working in project groups over the course of a number of lectures.

Limitations

Students must join the session with their City credentials for the breakout room assignment to work.
If students join late and the breakout room activity has started, they will not be automatically assigned to the breakout room and you will need to move them to the right breakout room.
You can end up with some very small breakout rooms if not all students turn up to the session.
If you scheduled recurring meetings, the pre-assigned breakout rooms will only work if it's applied to all meetings in the recurrence. You can't edit a single meeting in the recurrence and apply a unique pre-assignment.

Pre assign breakout rooms (Zoom guidance)

Practice makes perfect

If this is your first time using Zoom, you can drop in to a Zoom Test Meeting to test your audio and video settings and to familiarise yourself with the basic meeting controls.
We would recommend scheduling a dry-run of your session with colleagues. This will give you a feel for what a Zoom meeting room is like with participants and you will bet an opportunity of running through your activities.
There are a number of different clicks to remember to launch and end different activities. You might find it helpful to write out a list of tasks that you need to do during the Zoom session or pop some post-its on your desktop to remind yourself of key actions. These might include:
- Record
- Pause recording during breakout rooms
- Enable share screen prior to opening breakout rooms.

Zoom Test Meeting

Check Zoom Meeting Client is up-to-date

Zoom regularly provides new versions of the Zoom desktop client and mobile app to release new features and fix bugs.

If you are using Zoom on a City device (i.e. laptop or desktop), updates to the Zoom client are managed centrally by IT.
If you are accessing on a personal device, we recommend checking for updates on a regular basis and upgrading to the latest version once it is available.

Zoom client: Check for updates External link

Zoom toolbar

The toolbar located at the bottom of the meeting interface contains all the tools and features for the meeting.

Meeting toolbar functionality
Feature	Role availability	Functionality
Mute/Unmute	All users	Microphone control. This feature may be active for you once you join the meeting. Select the icon to mute/unmute your audio.
Start Video/Stop Video	All users	Webcam control. This feature may be active and broadcasting as you join the meeting. Select the icon to stop/start your webcam.
Participants	All users	Review a list of participants currently attending the meeting and to review hands raised and other non-verbal feedback provided by participants. Host and co-hosts can promote and demote users from the Participants feature.
Polls	Host, alternative hosts and co-hosts	Host, co-hosts and alternative hosts can open and run polls created by the host. The host and alternative host can add new polls to a meeting. (Host needs to have enabled the setting during meeting set up to Allow alternative hosts to create and edit polls.) All participants can participate in polls. The host, alternative host and co-hosts cannot participate in polls.
Chat	All users	Access and participate the online text chat tool and post chat messages during the meeting. The meeting host and co-hosts can limit who participants can chat with and can disable this feature.
Share Screen	All users	The host and co-hosts can decide if all users can have access to Share Screen or they can stop participants from sharing their screen.
Record	Hosts and co-hosts	Record, pause and stop the recording.
Live Transcript	Host and All users	Once enabled by the host, all users will have access to the Live Transcript feature to control their display of captions and transcript.
Breakout Rooms	Hosts and co-hosts	The host and co-host can open and manage breakout rooms. Participants can participate in breakout rooms. Only the host can review requests for help in the breakout rooms.
Reactions	All users	Provide non-verbal feedback.
End/Leave	All users	Participants see an option to leave meeting. The host has the option of ending the meeting for all users.