Communicate clearly with students during a Zoom meeting

Chatting with students

The chat allows you to send written messages to participants during your meeting and, if you have the setting enabled, for participants to respond. You may decide to appoint a co-host to monitor the chat while you are running the meeting. Participants can also delete their own chat messages and use threaded replies, and react to other messages with emojis. These options are switched on by default and can be switched off in Zoom settings. To prevent misuse of the chat function, private chats between participants are not allowed. 

Once you are in your Zoom meeting, select ‘Chat’ from the bottom navigation menu. 

Non-verbal feedback

Once you are in your Zoom meeting, select ‘Participants’ from the bottom navigation menu – a list of participants who are currently in the meeting will appear. You’ll see an icon appear next to their name and in their video panel if they have selected a feedback or reaction icon.

If a participant has selected ‘Raise hand’ you can lower their hand by selecting ‘Lower hand’ next to their name. Select ‘Clear all’ to remove all non-verbal feedback icons.

Find out more…

Find out more about providing and managing non-verbal feedback on Zoom’s Help Center.

Sharing your screen

You can share your screen when a meeting is in progress to demonstrate or show an application or page from your perspective to other meeting participants. To prevent unwelcome interruptions during your meeting, participants will not be able to share their screen unless you change your settings.

Once you are in a Zoom meeting, select ‘Share Screen’ from the bottom navigation menu.

Select ‘Desktop’ to show your whole screen. Or select a particular application or window to only show content from that window.

Select ‘Share’ to start sharing.

Select ‘Pause Share’ in the the meeting controls toolbar to freeze the screen. Select ‘Stop Share’ to finish sharing your screen.

During a meeting, if you want to allow meeting participants to share their screen, select the arrow to the right of ‘Share Screen’ on the meeting navigation menu. You can select ‘One participant can share at a time’, ‘Multiple participants can share simultaneously‘ (only recommended for experienced Zoom users) or ‘Advanced Sharing Options’.

Upon selecting ‘Advanced sharing options’ a small pop-up window will appear. Select ‘All Participants’ under the ‘Who can share?’ section. Other participants will now be able to share their screen with everyone in the meeting.

When a participant’s screen share is finished, you can ask the participant to stop sharing their screen. You can also stop their screen share yourself by selecting ‘View options’ next to the green screen share banner. Select ‘Stop Participant’s Sharing’.

Running a poll

Creating and running a poll in your scheduled Zoom meeting allows you to gather responses from your attendees for single and multiple choice questions. You should create your poll in advance of the meeting. Polls must be set to anonymous if you want to download a report of responses after the meeting. Polling is only available for scheduled meetings, and not instant meetings.

Setting up a poll

Login to UTS Zoom web portal using your UTS student/staff ID and email password. Select ‘Meetings’ from the left hand navigation menu.

Select your meeting title from the upcoming meetings tab. You must have already scheduled the meeting.

Scroll to the bottom of the page. Select ‘Add’ in the poll section.

Fill in the poll title, question, and at least two answers. Tick the box to make the poll anonymous and enable you to download a report after the meeting. Select single or multiple choice.

Select ‘Add a Question’ to create a new question in the same poll and select ‘Save’. Follow the above process from the ‘Add’ step onwards to create another poll for the same meeting.

Launching a poll during a meeting

Once you are in your scheduled Zoom meeting and ready to start the poll, select ‘Polling’ from the bottom navigation menu.

Select the poll you want to launch from the dropdown menu.

Select ‘Launch Poll’ to send the poll to other meeting participants.

The questions will appear with a timer. You can see how many participants have selected each answer to the right of the screen.

Select ‘End Poll’ to stop participants submitting responses – the poll results will appear on the screen. Select ‘Share results’ to allow participants to see the results. Select ‘Re-launch’ to allow participants to submit answers again.

Assigning students to specific groups in a Breakout Room

You can do this manually during a meeting but, depending on the size of your meeting, it could take a lot of time. For large groups, it is preferable to Preassign participants before the meeting starts. To do this, you need to enable this option in your Zoom settings as follows:

1. Log in to zoom.uts.edu.au
2. Navigate to Settings on the left hand menu
3. Under the Meeting options click ‘In meeting (Advanced)’
4. It will scroll down the page and you will see ‘Breakout Room’
5. Select the checkbox which says ‘Allow host to assign participants to breakout rooms when scheduling’ and save

Now, when you schedule meetings, an extra checkbox will appear under ‘Meeting Options’ labelled ‘Breakout Room pre-assign’.

Using the Whiteboard

Using the Whiteboard in a Zoom meeting allows you to collaborate with other meeting participants by drawing and writing on a virtual whiteboard page.

Once you are in a Zoom meeting, select ‘Share Screen’ from the bottom navigation menu.

Select ‘Whiteboard’.

Select ‘Share’ to open the Whiteboard page. Select the icons on the Whiteboard toolbar to add and remove content on the Whiteboard page.

• Select ‘Save’ to download the Whiteboard page as an image file.
• Select ‘Pause Share’ in the the meeting controls toolbar to freeze the Whiteboard page.
• Select ‘Stop Share’ to finish sharing the Whiteboard page.

You can also use the Whiteboard for collaborative annotation. Check out Zoom’s guide on how to use annotation tools on a shared screen or whiteboard.

Teaching approaches when using Zoom

There are different teaching approaches you can practice when using Zoom with your students. View our resources on Online case-based learning and Online subject with 12-weeks lectures and tutorials from our ARTT collection.

Using a Spotlight

Spotlighting allows the meeting host to focus the attention on up to 9 selected participants, so that all attendees will only see those participants on their screen. This feature can be used to spotlight a keynote speaker, interviewee, or interpreter.

In your meeting, hover over the participant you want to spotlight, then select the ellipsis button.

Select ‘Spotlight for Everyone’. Select ‘Add spotlight’ in the menu of any other participants you also want to spotlight – you can spotlight up to 9 people at a time.

Select ‘Remove spotlight’ in the corner of the video window to cancel that person’s spotlight. The meeting will return to showing the active speaker if all spotlights are removed.