Did you know that you can integrate Zoom directly into Canvas? We recommend this approach because it makes it easy for students to access your Zoom meetings:
Log in to Canvas and go to your course page. Go to Settings (at the bottom of the blue menu on the left side of your screen), then Navigation (one of the blue tabs on the top of the Settings page).
Scroll down to Zoom, click the row of vertical dots next to this work, then click Enable. Then click Save.
You'll now see Zoom in the menu on the left side of your Canvas course site (you may have to refresh the page if it's not immediately visible). Click Zoom to schedule meetings and to see Zoom-related content you've created like recordings. Note: When accessing Zoom for the first time in the course navigation, you may need to click the Authorize button to proceed. You'll need to enable Zoom for each individual course.
If you schedule your Zoom meeting in Canvas, then students will be able to easily access upcoming Zoom meetings and recordings (if you are recording any sessions) from the "Zoom" menu item on your Canvas course site.
The "Add A Zoom Meeting to Canvas" PDFLinks to an external site. provides more information on adding your Zoom Personal Meeting Room to Canvas, as well as how to add Zoom meetings to Canvas Modules and Canvas Course Events. You may want to add Zoom meetings to modules if you want to provide students with another quick link to that week's meetings.
Inviting others to join your meeting: If you'd like to share a link to your meeting with students via email or through other means, simply open the meeting in Canvas (or in Zoom), copy the “Join URL,” and share. There are other ways to invite: for example, you can choose the “Copy the Invitation” option, which also provides information for participants to join via a telephone number. In the Zoom Help Center, you can learn more about inviting others to join a meetingLinks to an external site..
Tip: to gain confidence about your Zoom skills, try inviting a friend to a Zoom meeting and practicing moving through these tools!
Managing Participants & Being a Host
Once you start a Zoom meeting, you are the host. This means you will have special controls, like the ability to mute participants, record a meeting, create breakout rooms, or even designate participants as hosts or co-hosts.
The Participants button is the key to your participant managementLinks to an external site.: it’s how you can mute or remove a participant, lock the meeting so no new participants can join, or designate a participant as host or co-host.
Chromebooks and Zoom
Zoom has a guide documenting "How To Use Zoom on a Chromebook." Links to an external site.Keep in mind that Chromebooks users can’t access some features in Zoom. Typically, Chromebooks users can’t access breakout rooms, use the annotation feature or virtual backgrounds, or share their whiteboard. As a workaround, Chromebook users can work together in the main Zoom room during breakout groups.
You (or your students) can find their whiteboard within the share screen options. Simply click Share Screen and look for the whiteboard option.
Letting your students share their screens
Our default settings do NOT allow participants other than the host to share their screens (except in breakout rooms where all participants can share screens by default). You can easily change this setting during your meeting by clicking the arrow next to the "Share Screen" button on your menu, clicking "Advanced Options," and then updating the "Who Can Share?" section to All Participants. Your students will now be able to share their screen.
If you would like to change the default so that participants can always share their screens in your meetings, you can modify your Zoom settings.
Tip: You’ll notice there are many options in Settings. Feel free to review them at your own pace! Just think carefully about which settings you update here!
You can divide students up automatically into groups or manually add students to specific groups. When you click "Breakout Rooms" in a live Zoom meeting, these will be the first options you see.
You can assign particular durations to breakout rooms, call students back to the main room, or send messages to all breakout rooms from the main room. Students can also request help from a breakout room if they are encountering difficulty and you need to visit their room.
Participants using Chromebooks may have difficulties joining breakout rooms. A workaround is to put them in a group that stays to work in your main Zoom meeting room, or call a breakout room with a group member experiencing this technical issue back to the main Zoom meeting room.
Recordings will only capture the main room, not what happens in breakout rooms.
Those in breakout rooms can no longer see content you shared in the main room (links in the main chat, for example) while they are in the breakout room. Make sure students have a clear sense of what they are expected to do in the breakout room. You may also make sure that instructions for breakout room tasks are visible on Canvas or in a Google Doc file that students previously have access to before the breakout session.
Chat
The chat feature can be a great way to engage students during a live session. Things to keep in mind:
Chat lets you broadcast a message to all participants, or send a private message to individual participants.
You can save your chatLinks to an external site.! Private messages between students will not be saved to the chat. Private messages that you send to students will be saved. You can also automatically save all Zoom chats for all Zoom meetings by updating Settings on salemstate.zoom.us.
It can be hard to multitask between talking and looking at the chat, especially when you are screen-sharing. Feel free to let your students know how/when you’ll be viewing chat (for example, you can tell them you’ll answer all questions right away, or to write them in the chat and you’ll pause to read them periodically). You may want to practice jumping in and out of the chat window with a friend to gain confidence.
Polls can be another great way to support student engagement in Zoom - sometimes it can help to get the ball rolling by having students participate anonymously.