Manage Participants
Share Your Screen
Breakout Rooms
Polling
Attendance Reports
Accessibility and Captions

Manage Participants

As the host in a meeting, you can manage a lot of how the participants can interact in your session. A lot of the features found here can be very useful for stopping a participant who is being disruptive to the class, either accidentally or not. While in a meeting you can do everything from mute a student who is having a side conversation to removing a student from the session all together.

With meetings, hosts and co-hosts can control the following features:

zoom in meeting manage participants menu. Activate this by clicking on button labeled more in the participants list

Mute participants
Request that a participant unmutes
Stop a participant's video
Request that a participant starts their video
Prevent participants from screen sharing
Rename a participant
Put a participant on hold if enabled
Choose to play an enter or exit chime
Lock the meeting to prevent anyone new from joining
Place participants in waiting room or admit/remove participants from the waiting room (waiting room can only be enabled by the host)

Only hosts have access to these features:

Give a participant the ability to record locally
Make a participant host or co-host
Enable waiting room

Additional Resources:

Managing Participants in a Meeting
In-Meeting Controls
Spotlight a participant's Video
See up to 49 Participants in Gallery View

Share Your Screen

Being able to share your screen is a major advantage to teaching remotely. Using Zoom's Share Screen feature you can share PowerPoints, websites, software, videos, and any thing that you can bring up on your computer. The Share Screen tool also comes with a built-in annotation capabilities so you can write highlight, underline, or spotlight particular areas of your shared screen that you want to emphasize to your class.

The Share Screen feature, by default, is set so that only the host can share their screen but you can change the settings mid-meeting to allow students to share their screens as well.

image of Zoom's Share Screen Controls. Who can share their screen? Hosts or All Participants?

Additional Resources:

Share Your Screen in Zoom
Using Annotations Tools
Optimize your Screen Share for Full Screen Video
Simultaneous Screen Sharing
Share an iOS device

Breakout Rooms

Breakout Rooms allow you to keep your group projects or discussion times without requiring students to leave the main meeting. With breakout rooms you can split your Zoom meeting in up to 50 separate sessions. When you activate the breakout rooms you can choose to split the participants of the meeting into these separate sessions automatically or manually, and can switch between sessions at any time. As the host you can also send a message to every breakout room or if a student has a question, they can use the Ask for Help button to trigger a flag for you to join their breakout room to answer questions. You can even set a timer for how long the breakout sessions will last and it will automatically make everyone rejoin the main class when it ends. Please note that if the meeting is being cloud recorded, it will only record the main room, regardless of what room the meeting host is in. If local recording is being used, it will record the room the participant who is recording is in. Multiple participants can record locally.

Participant-Selected Breakout Rooms

An alternative to Pre-Assigned Breakout rooms would be Zoom's newest tool, participant selected breakout rooms. If you update to the latest version of Zoom (5.3) and turn pre-assigned breakout rooms off, the participants can select which rooms they enter. Here is an excerpt from Zoom's website: "The host can now create breakout rooms with the option for participants to self-select which breakout room they would like to join. If enabled, participants can move freely between breakout rooms, without needing the host’s help. Both the meeting host and participants need to be on Client 5.3.0 or later to self-select Breakout Rooms."

Pre-Assign Participants to Breakout Rooms

It is possible to pre-assign breakout rooms before your class even begins to help speed up breakout room activity facilitation. Read below for more details.

Schedule Zoom Session(s) from Your Canvas Course

Login to your Canvas course and select Zoom from the course menu.
Schedule your Zoom session(s) and select settings
If session will be recurring, select the “Recurring Meeting” option and indicate the recurrence.
Recommended settings: enable waiting room, record the meeting automatically.
Do not enable join before host
Save meeting.

Set Pre-Assigned Breakout Rooms from Zoom

How to Create Recurring Self-Selected Breakout Rooms

Start Meeting from Canvas Course

Instructor

Back on your Canvas course, click Zoom from course menu
Locate the scheduled meeting from Upcoming Meetings tab.
Click Start button to launch meeting.

Students

Login to Canvas and locate your course
Click the Zoom link from course menu
From the Upcoming Meetings tab locate the meeting and click Join button to launch session

Launch Breakout Rooms

In the Zoom session, instructor will click Breakout rooms option from control toolbar at the bottom of Zoom session
The breakout rooms window will display the pre-assigned rooms and students below each.
Click “Open All Rooms”
Students will receive an invite to join their assigned breakout room
When activity is finished click Close All Rooms to return students to the main room

Additional Resources:

Enabling Breakout Rooms
Managing Breakout Rooms
Participating in Breakout Rooms
CSUS Pre-Assign your Breakout Rooms
Pre-Assign Breakout Rooms more instructions

Polling

Polling is a feature that Zoom offers that gives you an opportunity to create a "clicker" environment in your online sessions. The polling feature allows you to create single choice or multiple choice polling questions for your class. You will be able to launch the poll during your meeting and gather the responses from your attendees. You also have the ability to download a report of polling after the meeting. Polls can also be conducted anonymously, if you do not wish to collect participant information with the poll results.

Polls need to be created in advance of the class meeting and can only be enabled on the https://csus.zoom.us/https://csus.zoom.us/) while you are in session so you can adjust the questions and answers to fit the class.

We recommend you enable polls on your recurring class Zoom meeting, and you create a couple of polls early, things that may be frequently asked questions in your class (True/False, Yes/No/Maybe). Then before each session you can add polls or edit existing polls to fit your lesson plan. If an interesting topic comes up during your class session you can easily create a new poll or edit an existing one. If you're interested in viewing the reports for each poll after the session, you should create a new poll every time, rather than edit an existing poll.

How to Make Polls in Zoom

Additional Resources:

Attendance Reports

Using the Zoom-Canvas integrations allows you to run attendence reports on your class sessions.

Zoom Attendance Report Page

How to View Attendance Reports in Zoom

For more information on the reports please refer to this recording of a webinar that the Academic Technology Center hosted. The discussion about Attendence Reports starts at the 2 hour 13 minute and 19 second mark

How to Enable Zoom Captions

Closed caption allows you or another meeting attendee, assigned by the host, to add closed captioning in a meeting. You can type the closed captions directly via Zoom, integrate a third party service, or you can also enable automated captions. The video below shows the steps to enable automated captions.

The guides below also show how to enable Zoom captions, both automated and manually assigned.

How To Enable Automated Zoom Captions

How To Enable Manually Assigned Captions in Zoom

<< Return to Zoom Overview/Topics

Need More Help?

Request support from the Academic Technology Services: servicedesk@csus.edu