Welcome back to the next post in our series where we are learning how to teach with Zoom. The goal of this series is to take you right from the very beginning stages of learning how to use Zoom right through to hosting your online sessions and teaching students in an online setting. Today, we will be focusing on step number 4: how to invite students to Zoom. If you’d like to get caught up on this series, you can find the previous posts HERE and then HERE.
In our last post, we learned how to schedule Zoom sessions. We also learned that we could find the list of those scheduled sessions on the meetings tab of our Zoom dashboard. Now, if we open one, what we will find is a join URL. This URL is what students can use to join the Zoom session. Sharing it with them can be as easy as sending an email with this URL.
Invite Students to Zoom Using Google Classroom
In my classes, my preferred way of providing resources, documents, and links for my students is by compiling them in Google classroom. I organize all of my content by topic. The “Getting Started” section is always the very first topic at the top of the Classwork page. This is where all the important information for things like Zoom links, class syllabus, and other documentation is located. I find this to be the best method particularly for the age group of students that I work with. This way they don’t have to be constantly sifting through their email in order to find links that I’ve sent. They can find the link in the exact same place on Google Classroom.
Invite Using Google Calendar
In our last post, one way we created a Zoom session was through our Google Calendar. This actually provides us an additional way in which we can invite students to our Zoom session. If you click on the event that you created and then choose edit event you can add guests to the event. Once guests have been added and you save the event, Google Calendar confirms whether or not you would like to send invitation emails to your guests. The email documents the information that you outlined for it along with a Zoom link and the option for them to add it to their own calendar.
Well there you have it folks. A few simple ways to invite your students to a Zoom meeting. Coming up in the next post we are going to investigate how it is that you can launch your very first Zoom session. We’re also going to be taking a look at the zoom desktop client that you use as a host. There’s some really interesting things that you can do with it so you’ll definitely want to check it out.
