Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Beginner’s Guide to Zoom Web Conferencing”.
In this article we will look at zoom and how we can use this to do web conferencing or video conferencing or remote conferencing step. One is just to go to zoom dot us and you can see if you click here on plans and pricing, that they have some great options. I would recommend that you start with the free option which lets you host up to a hundred participants in a meeting, and those meetings can last 40 minutes. You can also do unlimited one-to-one meetings and they have a lot of great features that you can see here.
There’S also pro options, business and enterprise options as well. If you want to try the free account, you can just click here, sign up, it’s free and then sign up with a work email address. You can also sign in with Google or Facebook, to link those accounts and automatically get signed in give me a minute to sign into my account and then I’ll resume the video. Now that I’m signed into my account, you can see here at the left some options for changing up my profile. I can upload a picture of myself. I can see what my room capacity is: there’s some date, format, options, time, format, options etc.
Now I’m gon na go to meetings by clicking on the meetings button and I want to show you how to schedule a new meeting. So let’s say you want to hold a virtual meeting with people that can’t be there with you present in the same room. This is a great option, just come in here and click schedule, a new meeting and then give your meeting a name. Maybe this is gon na be a board meeting. Maybe it will be a tutoring session whatever it is, you can title it appropriately so that people know what to expect underneath the topic title you can put in a description next, I can come down here and select the date for this webinar or meeting the best Way to do that is just click here and type in the date or you can also click this button to select it from a calendar. I will choose, May 29th and I can schedule the time for the meeting.
Let’S say 8:00 p.m. if I want to. I can set the duration of the meeting now it’s possible for these to go long. That’S okay, but the expected amount of time might be 45 minutes just notice. What it says here with the basic free zoom account you’re limited to 40 minutes every once in a while you’ll get a free upgrade from zoom and it’ll bump that up to an hour or hour and a half. But you can’t depend on that with the free account browsing down the options a little bit, you can see, there’s an option to make this a recurring meeting every Friday every Monday, whatever you want to do next, I usually just pick this generate automatically a meeting ID.
If you want to make sure your meeting is extra secure, you can require a meeting password, so the participants would have to know this code in order to fully enter the room and the meeting I’m going to uncheck that next you can decide if the host and Participants, videos will be on by default and I usually put on for both of those. Do you want the participants to be able to call in, in addition to using a computer, if you want one or the other, you can certainly set that up or you could say both. Then we have some meeting options and I have found these to be pretty important.
I like this option here, enable join before host. If you click that button people can join your room even before you get there. Let’S say someone joins 20 minutes before you’re, even in the room, that’s okay they’ll be able to sit there and wait for you. If you don’t want that, obviously uncheck it, you could force them to be muted when they enter, and then you can unmute them later. If you want, you could turn on a waiting room. If you enable this, when people join your room, they’re not fully in the room they’re in a waiting room and then you go in and start the meeting and you click buttons to bring them into the room when you’re ready.
I think that’s a good idea. In theory, but usually I uncheck that notice that there’s also an option to automatically record the meeting with the free account. It only records it on your local computer, but that’s a nice feature to be able to say that you automatically want it to record. I found that when I don’t check this box, if I want to record a meeting, I often forget that I wanted to record it, so it’s good to set it automatically all right, I’m happy with these settings, I’m going to click Save, and this meeting is ready To begin now, how do my participants know that this meeting is going to happen? Well, I could certainly add it to a Google Calendar. Maybe it’s a shared Google Calendar and they can see that or an Outlook calendar yahoo calendar. But for me I’ve found one of the easiest ways to invite people to attend. A meeting is simply to go here and click copy, the invitation when you click it. It gives some instructions for how to join the meeting now. Normally, there would also be instructions for people to call in on a phone and just hear the meeting rather than see it, but at the time of this, recording zoom is not including that by default in all free accounts, it’s reserving that for the paying customers, but Watch for that option to see if you have it so I’m going to just click and drag to highlight the invitation. I can copy that and then I could paste that into my gmail or Outlook or whatever email system, I’m using just paste it in as the message and send an email out to the group of people that I want invited to this meeting now.
Another option. In addition to copy, the invitation would be to just copy this link. If you have had meetings like this before with a group of people, they might not need to know all of this information. They don’t need to know all these details. They might just need this link, so you could just copy paste that into an email message or a text or whatever you want to do to get the message out now when it comes time for you to conduct the meeting, you could just go to your zoom Account zoom dot u.s. log into your account and then click here on my account go to meetings and there’s my board meeting scheduled. I can just click start and what happens next may depend on the browser that you’re using and whether you’re using a Windows, computer, a Mac, etc. I’M using Google Chrome on a Mac and you can see I get a pop-up asking permission to open, zoom dot u.s..
I am going to say yes, open, zoom dot u.s. now, if you have never used soom on a particular computer, this may not work the first time you may need to first download and run zoom, and this basically installs some drivers and some files on your computer. That are necessary to run zoom, and just so you know, your participants will probably have to do this too, the first time that they participate in a zoom conference. If you know that zoom is installed on your computer and yet it’s not running and you’re not prompted with this pop-up, you may need to click here. I’M just gon na click open, zoom, us it’s going to launch, and now I get an option to join this web conference with computer audio, so I’m gon na click join with computer audio. It’S now accessing my microphone and my voice is being broadcast to the group. Now notice here in the lower left, it says: click if you want to switch to a different microphone or speaker.
So here’s the microphone and I can mute that at any time let’s say: there’s a sound going on in the room that I’m recording in. I could mute it so that the participants don’t hear that sound just to the right of that you’ll notice that there’s an arrow that you can click to switch microphones, you could either use the built-in microphone if you have one or you could switch to another one. Now it is possible to also test your microphone and speaker when I got that pop-up in the center of the screen. There was an option to test my audio you’ll see that the same option is here test speaker and microphone and a ringtone should play. If you hear it say yes and then you can speak and then if you hear your voice repeated back, then you know your microphone is working.
You can click finish and begin speaking in addition to the microphone toggle to turn it on and off. There’S also a video toggle to turn off the video. When you turn off your video, the picture that you upload into your zoom us account will be shown here on the screen. So that’s why it may be important to include a picture of yourself and then you can click here to go back to webcam video. I’M gon na go full screen just so you can see all of this a little better. If you look just to the right of the start or stop video button again, we have some options hidden under an arrow button.
So if I click there, one of the options is to choose a virtual background, and here are some backgrounds that I’ve used in the past. So I could select one of these. The first time you do this, you may need to download a plug-in to make it work, but once you’ve done that you’ve got the virtual background behind you, I’m happy with that. So I’ll X, out of it and let’s look quickly at the options that you have here while conducting a meeting so that you can hold an effective meeting with others.
If, during a meeting you realize you haven’t invited someone that should have been invited, you can click that invite button and you’ll get suggestions from your contacts or from email, and you can send them a direct invitation to this meeting. You can also manage the participants that are in the meeting if you click this button here, you’ll get a list of everyone and you can click and drag to put that list wherever you want it to be, even on a second monitor, if you would like – and You can put your mouse on a particular participant to mute them or unmute them. You can also click the more button for more options, notice below there’s, also a mute all button and an unmute all button. These are great when you just need to silence their room for a minute and maybe lecture or do a presentation and then unmute all so that people can talk here in the more button. We have some great options, mute participant on entry.
You can have a enter exit chime so that you know when people have entered the room or left the room, and you can also lock the meeting. So no one else can enter so some pretty good options. They’Re going along with this there’s also a chat option. If you click chat, you can type messages to the entire group tap enter, and everyone can see that you can also click to select, not everyone but specific people that you want to chat with. If, during the meeting, you would like to share your screen, you can go down here to the bottom, with a list of tools and click on share screen, and here I could select a second monitor that I want to share or a particular application that I want To share and then just click the share button and people will be able to see whatever I have decided to share notice that you can also check this box to share your computer sound. So if you have a video that you want to show people, you want to check this button so that they can hear the audio from the video and also see the video you could optimize screen share for video clips again, if you’re, showing a video it’ll make It look better and then just click share, I’m going to X out of that, but also know that there is an option here for not just one participant sharing their screen, but multiple participants can share simultaneously there’s some advanced sharing options to help you with that.
That can get kind of complicated and messy, but if you want it is an option notice that I have a start/stop recording option. I’Ll click stop to stop the recording. You can also start a recording by clicking here and then. Finally, as people are talking, you may want to give some reactions and you can do that by clicking here on the reactions button and your participants can also do this. So let’s say someone says something particularly good: you could click the applaud symbol or, if you agree with something someone said thumbs up and it’s a way to just give some feedback quickly and without disturbing people. Now the next thing I’d like to show you is hard for me to show, because I’m the only one in this particular meeting. But if you have more than one person in the room here at the top, there should be an option to change the view by default. I believe the view is whoever is talking will be visible, real big here front and center, but if you click one of the buttons that normally is here in a larger group, you can make it so that you can see everybody’s faces simultaneously. So I could have one person here another here and it becomes kind of a picture board or video board of all the different participants, and you can see people’s reactions simultaneously and it makes for a really good meeting.
If you switch to that all participants view when you’re done with your meeting, you can click end meeting and end meeting for all that closes it out, and people aren’t going to be able to continue talking. So just be aware of that, because I set this to be recorded automatically. Zoom is now asking where to save and it wants access to my documents, folder, so I’ll click, OK and it’s now converting my meeting recording and it’s going to save it into my documents. I’M gon na stop that because I don’t really need it so everything I just showed right there. That really is all you need to know to get started using the free zoom web conferencing service. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful.
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