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Canvas Help Guide: Zoom

Best Practice - Advising

In order to protect our student's privacy and ensure that no one is able to access confidential information during an advising session, we recommend that you make your advising sessions with students password protected. This option is the default option on your Zoom account already, so you do not need to do anything. In consultation with ITS and others, we do not think this is necessary for classroom meetings, but do believe it is beneficial when discussing protected information with your advisees. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact either Andrew Adler or Don Blakeman.

Professor Luke Granlund in the MPC department wrote a tutorial on how to use breakout rooms in Zoom for individual help during assessments, such as exams. This allows for providing private, individual help using the breakout room feature while maintaining the ability to address the class as a whole.  

What is Zoom?

Zoom is a web based communication technology (synchronous) that unifies video conferencing, online meetings, group messaging, and a software-defined conference room solution into one easy-to-use platform. Zoom offers a great video, audio, and wireless screen-sharing experience across Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux systems.

Best Practices

My Profile

Personal Meeting ID (PMI)

You can customize your Personal Meeting ID and URL. This is a meeting number that remains constant and is associated with your Georgetown Zoom account. You also have the option to use this number when starting instant meetings or when scheduling a meeting.

Advantages
You can default your Personal Meeting ID to your work phone number (317-940-xxxx). This makes it easy to remember for people to request a meeting with you.

Disadvantage
Setting a persistent Personal Meeting ID makes it easier for Georgetown employees and students to enter your Personal Meeting Room without an invitation. This could be disruptive to meetings in progress. You can always password protect Scheduled Meetings to prevent this from happening.

Recommendation
Set your Meeting Preferences so that Instant Meetings do NOT use your Personal Meeting ID.  You can still share and use your Personal Meeting ID when it's appropriate. This helps to prevent random people joining a meeting in progress using your Personal Meeting ID.

 

My Meeting Settings

Here are some recommendations for your Meeting Settings that include functionality and convenience.

In Meeting (Basic)

Enable these

  • Chat
  • Private Chat
  • Allow host to put attendee on hold (Allows host to stop video and audio transmission to a participant.)
  • Co-host
  • Annotation
  • Polling (for quick instant polling within a meeting)
  • Non-verbal feedback (Participants in a meeting can provide non-verbal feedback and express opinions by clicking on icons in the Participants panel.)
In Meeting (Advanced)

Enable these

  • Breakout room

Recording

You can record meetings to your local drive (creates an .mp4 file) or you can record to the cloud.

NOTE:  Cloud recordings are automatically deleted after 60 days!

When you Select Recorded Meetings from the desktop app, you can:

  • Play the recording with both video and audio.
  • Play Audio plays the audio part of the meeting. It will not play the video if there is any for the meeting.
  • Open will bring you to the folder that contains all your meeting recordings.
  • Delete will delete the recorded meeting. 

More about Recording

Getting Started

System Recommendations
  • An internet connection – broadband wired or wireless (3G or 4G/LTE)
  • Speakers and a microphone – built-in or USB plug-in or wireless Bluetooth
  • A webcam or HD webcam - built-in or USB plug-in
  • Or, a HD cam or HD camcorder with video capture card

Note: Zoom will not work over a virtual desktop connection 

 

First things first!!! Sign into Zoom

Signing into Zoom using these steps will establish your account with Zoom

  1. You should have received an email from ITS with an invitation to join GC's Zoom conferencing services. If you no longer have this email, contact the ITS Help Desk for assistance. (Phone: 502-863-4357 / Email: ITSHelpDesk@georgetowcollege.edu)
  2. Use your favorite browser and go to Canvas through the GC Portal
  3. You will need to add Zoom (Online Conferencing) to your Canvas course shell
    1. Navigate to your course in Canvas
    2. Click on ‘Settings’ (far bottom of the left-hand nav-bar in your course)
    3. Click on Navigation
    4. Drag ‘Zoom (Onine Conferencing’ above the ‘Drag items here to hide them from students’ line.
Now you are ready to schedule or start Zoom meetings!!
 
How to schedule a meeting

 

Desktop App

The desktop app is not required for meetings through Canvas, but it usually does make meetings function more smoothly.
Overview of the Desktop Application

  1. View in Settings the settings for your Zoom meetings. This includes Audio, Video, General (Application, Content Sharing, and Instant Message), Feedback, Recording, Account Type (Basic, Pro, etc.), and Stats (Overall, Audio, Video, and Screen Sharing). See Home Screen: Settings for more details.

  2. Select Start without video to start a meeting sharing your desktop or application.

  3. Select Start with video to start a video meeting.

  4. Select Schedule to set up a future meeting.

  5. Select Join to join a meeting that has already started . 

  6. Home screen pic

Home Screen Drop down

From the Home Screen drop-down menu, you can:

  • Set your availability to Available or Busy.
  • Change your account picture.
  • Check for updates to Zoom.
  • Get help using Zoom.
  • Switch to another Zoom account
  • Log out or exit Zoom. 

          Home Screen drop down

 

Upcoming Meetings

When you select the Meetings icon, you can:

  1. View Upcoming or meetings you have Recorded.
  2. View your Personal Meeting ID (PMI).
  3. Select whether you always want to use your Personal Meeting Identi- fier (PMI) for instant meetings on the current computer.
  4. For Recurring Meetings, you can:
  • Start the meeting
  • Edit the meeting settings.
  • Schedule the meeting in Outlook or Google Calendar, or, copy the meeting invitation to send via email or message.

For Scheduled Meetings, you can:

  • Start the meeting
  • Edit the meeting settings.
  • Delete the meeting.
  • Copy the meeting invitation. 

More best practices

Here are some Zoom best practices to keep your meetings private and help you be a good Zoom community member:

  • Use Randomly Generated Meeting Numbers: Zoom assigns each host a Personal Meeting Number but once you give that to someone they can join any meeting you host and have a head start because they already know the meeting ID. When starting a meeting in the client make sure use my personal meeting ID is unchecked.
  • Passwords: Use passwords for all your meetings.  Passwords help keep your meeting private. Relying on a random 11 digit number to insure privacy in the age of automation is not enough. 
  • Enable Passwords for Audio connections: Zoom treats audio calls and people connecting via the web (or client software) differently.  There is a separate setting for enabling passwords for audio only attendees.  If you have created an alpha numeric password for your meeting it should prompt you for a separate numeric password for audio only callers. It should be enabled by default.  You may have to log into the web and check your settings.
  • Store Recordings Locally when possible: Recordings should be stored on your local machine.  The College has limited storage on the Zoom servers and should only be used when necessary.
  • Password protect Recordings in the Cloud: Recordings stored on Zoom servers should always be password protected.  Zoom makes the assumption that all recordings are meant to be shared on the internet. If you have made cloud recordings in the past you can still password enable them through recording management.
  • Remove Recordings in the Cloud that you no longer need: If you have a recording in the cloud you no longer need, please remove it.  Better yet, you can go into settings and indicate how many days Zoom should keep your cloud recordings before they are automatically deleted.
  • Don't use the Zoom waiting room feature: They are currently updating the waiting room feature to isolate participants while they are waiting to be entered into the meeting.
  • Remove unwanted Participants: Remember you can always remove unwanted participants from any meeting.
  • Stay Current with Zoom Client Releases: The latest client was released on Sunday, April 12th.

 

Upgrading to latest version of Zoom

Following recommendations from ITS, you should make sure that you have the most up-to-date version of Zoom on your computer. This requires you to update your client to the most recent version of Zoom on your machine. In order to do this, follow the steps below:

Zoom provides a pop-up notification when there is a new mandatory or optional update within 24 hours of logging in.

You can also manually download the latest version by:

Note: https://zoom.us/download is hosted on cloudfront.net while https://zoom.us/download2 is hosted on zoom.us

If you already have the Zoom desktop client installed, you can check for updates:

  1. Sign in to Zoom desktop client.
  2. Click your profile picture then click Check for Updates.

    If there is a newer version, Zoom will download and install it.

There are 3 types of updates; web-only, mandatory and optional.

  • Web-only updates are available for new fixes that are being tested. 
  • Mandatory updates will start once you click on update. You cannot proceed further until you update.
  • Optional updates will start once you click on update. You can proceed should you decide to postpone the update till a later time and update manually. 

Note: If you choose to postpone your optional update, you will only be prompted to update the next time you login.