Zoom Tutorial

[00:00:00] Ian: Hey guys, it’s Ian with Kentucky spin, and today I’m going to show you kind of a quick tutorial on Zoom. How to install it, and then we’re going to move right into kind of a quick overview of how everything works. All right, let’s get started.

Okay, so here we’re on the Google screen and we’re going to basically go through kind of what it would look like to install Zoom.

So you’re going to just, go to the search bar and type in Zoom. And this is the correct one right here that says Zoom video conference, web conferencing. So we’re going to click that and then you’re going to see this screen and you want to click “sign up for free”.

[00:01:00] And then you’re going to enter in your date of birth. So let’s say it was May 3rd, I’m just making this up, 1990 and click continue. So here is where things get kind of important. So you’ll, you’ll fill in your email address here, and then once you do that, you, you will get sent a confirmation email.

And then,  you’re going to want to check your email for that. That one I was just talking about. It could take up to like five minutes. Then you want to click “activate account”. You want to fill out the rest of your account information. You can skip inviting other people for now and then there is what’s called a “personal meeting URL”.

So now I want to show you what that will look like without going through this process, simply [00:02:00] because I already have a Zoom account.

Okay? So as you can see here, this is kind of what your profile screen will look like. Obviously, this person’s, information is blurred. Yours will not be blurred. You will have your information here.

And, your personal meeting ID will be this number right here. I’m going to show you kind of what it looks like to see that number. Basically, this is it right here, but a bigger version of that will be, this right here. So if you could see this, this is just a Google search result of kind of what it looks like when they show you your personal meeting ID.

So you will need to hold onto that. And then you’re now set up. So you can go ahead and start a meeting now to see how these video rooms work and all that. And I’m going to show [00:03:00] you a quick, kind of a look around of the software so you can kind of see what it looks like. So I want to go over that right now.

You seek out zooming my cat right now. His name’s Simba and he has decided that he’s going to give a bath on screen for y’all. Okay, so first thing I think that we should go over is the buttons along the bottom of the menu. Now if your mouse is still for a little bit, that will disappear.

So,  you know, if it disappears, don’t freak out. That’s normal. It kind of hides itself after a few seconds. If you go down here to reactions, there’s a little thumbs up and a clap icon if you wanted to do that. And I believe that goes in the chat box. Let’s just double check that.

It does not. So that’s just, oh, you see the big, the big thumb icon up there, so it’ll, it’ll do it up there. Cool. [00:04:00] So that’s your reactions. There’s also I believe, a hand raising, but that might only pop-up when there’s more people. Since this is just me and Simba right now, it may not. There’s no need to really raise your hand.

Okay. the next is the record button. So if you wanted to record this Zoom, which I’m recording it using quick player, so I’m not using the actual feature inside of Zoom, but you could. And you could record it and keep it. Now, I think the free version has a limit of recording, so I don’t think that it’s unlimited.

And then this is your chat window. So I’m going to close it and then reopen it. So this is what it looks like. You can it looks like put files in there. And by the way, this is the actual downloaded version. So there’s also a version that you can open up in a web browser. And from what I’ve seen so far, that one has a little bit limited controls.

[00:05:00] Also, I’m a host, so being a host. There are certain things that I can do that other people can’t do, and that’ll make sense here in a second. So here’s the chat box, you see here it says to everyone, so you can speak to an individual person inside of the room, the meeting room, or you can write a message to everyone and you can quickly click here and see, it’ll say, Ian, because I’m messaging my other account, which is also Ian. So I’m just going to say “hello”. And it says, you see here in red, it says privately. So that means that only you know, Ian or the person that you’re writing can see what you’re writing. Now if you go back to everyone, I can say, “what’s up”.

And now everyone can see that. One thing I think you should pay attention to, that’s interesting, everything is [00:06:00] in one chat box. So you know other instant messaging and stuff, it splits it up. Your private messages are somewhere in a different window, and then your messages to everyone is a different window.

That’s not how this works. So everything is in one chat box. So you’ll see the hello that I sent privately. And you’ll also see the what’s up I sent to everyone. So it’ll be really important if you’re using the chat box a lot to really make sure you watch and see what you wrote to everyone, because you may be having a sidebar conversation during the meeting that you don’t want to overflow into everybody to see.

So that’s just something to kind of pay a little attention to it. Like I said, you can upload files, it looks like. Participant can chat with, and then you can select some of that. Those are some options there. And then you can close it, or you can pop-out the chat box, which just means it could be its own separate window.

So that’s something else that you could do as well. I’m going to leave that open, moving to the left, you’ve got participants. So [00:07:00] here you can see it’s just me and myself. You can mute people, cause I’m the host so I can mute people. I can invite people. I think other participants can invite people as well.

So that’s not an exclusive thing. These are some more controls when you click more. So it says mute participants on entry. Allow participants to unmute themselves. Right. Play enter or exit chime. So if you’ve ever joined a Zoom call, it’ll go be-do, and that’s just kind of a sound to let everybody know the call that somebody has joined.

So that’s, a really good feature to, to have, excuse me my allergies are acting up. You can allow participants to rename themselves. You can lock a meeting, which I believe, I’m not sure what that does entirely, but I think that that will make it to where other people can not join. And then you [00:08:00] can enable a waiting room, so when people are joining, sometimes people will join ahead of you, if you’re the host, it’ll put them in like a waiting room. And then it’ll just kind of sit there until you join. It’ll send them a message that says something to the effect of waiting for the host to join and initiate meeting or something like that.

And I’ve seen that message before. So that’s what the participant screen looks like. Moving to the left again. Oh wait, actually I skipped one. My apologies. So between chat and record, you’ll see right here it says share screen. This is a very important feature. In a lot of meetings, it’s important to share what you’re seeing, especially if you’re presenting something, whether it’s a PowerPoint, a picture, a document.

You can make sure that this can be seen from all the different people inside of the meeting. So you just go, I’m not going to actually do it, but you go to click share screen and then it’ll actually ask you which window you see. I [00:09:00] have multiple things open. It’s going to ask you which one do you want to, you know, broadcast the screen from. And there’s different options. And, there’s also an option for an iPhone, iPad or airplay, which you could do it remotely, iPhone, iPad via cable. So there’s some multiple options. There’s also a whiteboard option, which I would imagine is just a blank space for you to like jot some notes down and show everybody.

This would be especially useful if you had somebody in a meeting who has some hearing difficulties, or maybe a, a hearing loss disability, that would be very useful. So yeah, that’s what the share screen feature. And then, so when you click it and you click share, like again, like I said, I’m not going to do it, but when you click share, it’s going to switch everything over and it will show my screen.

The only reason why I’m not doing it is because it’s going to show the same screen that you’re going to see, when I create this video. So. There’s no point in doing that again. So I’m going to click the X on that. [00:10:00] And then, okay, now, back to where we originally were at participants. When you move left, you see this security little button.

So let’s click that. And here’s the quick menu of kind of what’s over here, where it says, let me get out of this, go to security. So it’ll say lock meeting, which is again, an option, we already kind of saw. And they have waiting room. Share your screen. And this is, so this right here is permissions for the participants that are going to log into the meeting.

So this is, again, this is a host. I’m a host. And basically what that means is, I’m the person who gets the to change the settings for the meeting space, the virtual meeting space. So I can allow participants to share their screen or I can click it, and then now, all of a sudden they cannot do that because there’s no check mark.

So now I’m going to click it and allow them, [00:11:00] and now there’s the check mark back. That also works for chat and renamed themselves. There’s also a remove participant button. So you could do virtual conferences or if something’s getting out of control or you know, something is too noisy. You can remove the participant and then you could use your phone or even send a quick email explaining to them why you ejected them from the meeting.

Hey, there was some background noise that was feeding into the meeting. Just call back from a quiet landline or something like that. So that’s something that you could do as well. And then of course you got your stop video button. Now this is really useful. So I’m going to click this. And then it just goes to a standard picture of me, which is what I’ve set in my account.

And then I’m going to go back to the video. So this is useful to turn on and off when say you’ve got to stand up and go to get a drink out of the refrigerator or something. [00:12:00] Now this is where it’s important if you were standing up right. And you didn’t have any boxers on or you didn’t, you know, you just had whatever all, I’d like you gotta think that that’s going to be on camera cause you can see in this video stream.

How much has seen of your body. So right now what I’m setting is just, you know, your upper torso, you know, stomach up, whatever. But you stand up and go somewhere and then people can see your whole body. So, that’s just something to be aware of because everybody’s working from home right now because of the virus.

And it’s really easy to forget what you’re wearing on a conference call. And that’s just something to kind of pay attention to. Cause it could slip very easily. There’s some funny videos out there. About what can happen with that. So stopping and starting video. Very important feature. Another one is the unmute and mute.

Similar thing. I’ve got myself muted right now, as you’ll see. So you’ll see a red line through the microphone. It does the same thing for the camera when you mute it. For the [00:13:00] microphone, I’ve muted myself on both machines because I do not want, there’s like a bad feedback because since the computers are very close to each other, so I’ve got a needed right now, but obviously normally those come unmuted as soon as you start a video.

Usually when you start into a meeting, there’s a prompt that says, do you want to start with video? You click yes, because people can also, excuse me, people can also join Zoom by phone. So when you first joined, it’ll say, do you want to do video? You click yes. Then there’s another prompting right after that when that says, do you want to use your computer speakers for this meeting?

You click yes. So those two prompts, as soon as you join any meeting, those popup. And so you’ll be, you don’t have to worry about muting yourself or unmuting yourself, but for the sake of purposes of this feature, to mute and unmute yourself, it’s useful if like, let’s say you’re eating, let’s say you’ve got some noise in the background, but you still are paying attention, but you don’t want that noise to come through and [00:14:00] interrupt who’s presenting.

You know, there could be construction going on nearby and you don’t want that to leak through the speaker. So just really limiting the noise on your end. Sometimes I’ve been on a lot of calls where there’s noise and nobody knows which camera is it picking up from. So sometimes the presenter will say, can everybody just mute themselves?

Or since I’m the host and since the presenter would be the host in this scenario, they can simply go to the security tools. And they can mute all participants or I think they can go to just participants, mute all, right here. They can click that. They can also unmute everybody. And be careful with that too, cause I’ve also been unmuted when I didn’t want to be.

So just pay attention to whether that microphone has a red slash through it. Because sometimes like if you’re not engaging as much as people want, they may just unmute you to see what you’re saying. Or if you’re saying anything or just to make sure your mic works or you know, there’s, there’s several different scenarios why the host would want to unmute you. They could say, Hey, we’re going to [00:15:00] do a round of introductions and you could be distracted doing something else, and then you come back and then you’re unmuted and you don’t know why, and what happened. So just kind of pay attention to that. If you see me looking over here, it’s because I have a monitor hooked up, so I’m actually looking at what’s going on, on this computer.

But I just have it, you know, kind of broadcasting to this screen. So don’t pay any attention to that. If you’re using this like a normal laptop, which this is, you’ll be looking at this camera, you know, this is a camera built in, so this is the quality, kind of what you’re going to get most of the time.

And then the other device I have on Simba is another laptop. So that’s obviously just a web cam. So I don’t want to confuse you when I’m looking over here, what’s, what’s happening. And so, I mean, that’s a lot of the bells and whistles of Zoom. It’s a pretty simple, pretty intuitive software, but it’s always good to kind of walk around these things to see how they work.

I think I [00:16:00] mentioned, yeah, I mentioned the clothes and stuff. Just kind of pay attention to that. Of the noise level that’s coming from your end. And I’d say those are the biggest things to pay attention to with Zoom. And, also I covered it for a second, but I’ll just mention it again here, that if there’s more participants, you can raise your hand.

So if somebody else was talking, and you had a question, you can quite literally raise your hand. And then, you know, obviously the presenter gets that notification and they will pause in their speech at some point and then probably ask you what was your question. So if you don’t get opportunity to ask right away, it might be helpful to have a little quick notepad or, or like, sticky note available so that you can jot down what you were going to say. Because if you’re anything like me, I lose my train of thought sometimes and I forget what I was going to ask. So there’s nothing worse than that feeling, when the presenter comes to you finally and says, “Hey, it looked like you had a question” and you’re like, “I forgot.”

So that’s where some sticky notes, or even if you just [00:17:00] have a computer, you can just open a quick a window, you know, word you can open just a word document, and type up a question real quick, so that way you don’t forget it. Okay, that reminds me, I didn’t cover this. So you can have the meeting going and be on another screen.

That is possible. Now, I actually found this out today that if you minimize this meeting, that it sends a notification to the presenter that lets them know that you’re not on your screen. So if this is a situation where you would get in trouble for multitasking, obviously I don’t recommend doing that.

If this is a situation where it’s like a staff meeting and you have another window open to Google quick things, you know, there’s several times where I’ve been in a staff meeting, my boss will ask me a question and I’ll just hop on Google real quick, Google something, come back to the meeting and the meeting is still recording.

So. [00:18:00] Let me see for the second purposes of just an example. Let me just go to Google tab here, I’m gonna type in cat. We’ll see what comes up and you know my screen is sharing, so you’ll see what I’m, what I’m doing, and then let’s go back. Now, that meeting did not stop, as you see. It was still continuing on.

Now, one thing you might want to do if you are doing some research is to stop your video because then people are seeing you look intensely into a screen and they’re wondering what, what’s going on? You know, that could be distracting for some people. So, if you’re going to do some searching, if it’s not a big deal and you’ll kind of get the tone of the meeting, if it’s like a more serious meeting and everybody’s kind of dressed up even for on camera.

And this is a meeting where they’re talking about some important details. It’s probably more important for you to engage, than it is to do some side research or check some emails. If it’s a situation where it’s kind of a laid back staff meeting to kind of check and see what [00:19:00] you’ve been up to this week and other people are talking, it’s not your turn yet to speak.

It may be okay to check a couple emails. But I would still recommend trying to stay engaged. Obviously have that volume on, on your computer so you can hear what the other participants are saying. And so those are just some quick tips for Zoom. I hope all this information was helpful. Until next time guys, peace out.