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 through to hosting your own online sessions and teaching students in an online setting. Today we will be investigating step number five: launching your very first online Zoom meeting.
Before you can launch and host your first online Zoom meeting, you will need to download the Zoom desktop client. A prompt to complete this download will appear the very first time you attempt to launch Zoom. Another way to access it is on the meetings tab from your Zoom dashboard. Simply choose the meeting that you want to launch and then click the start button. Follow the prompts on the screen to install it.
Download The Desktop Client
Only hosts of Zoom sessions require the download. Your students do not need to download the desktop client. It’s not a requirement for them to join your Zoom session. It is only a requirement for you as a host in order to host the Zoom session.
Because there is still some set up, I recommend launching Zoom without students the first time. Do a trial run before you have your Zoom sessions with your students. Once the download has been completed you will be prompted to sign in again. You will then launch Zoom and bring up the desktop client.
From this desktop app you are able to do most things that you can from the zoom.us website so you can schedule meetings, join meetings, or start hosting an instant meeting. There are even chat features for contacts that you have through Zoom.
Starting Your First Online Zoom Meeting
You can access online Zoom meetings by clicking on the meetings tab. You can see the instant meeting, your personal meeting, or any upcoming meetings that you have already scheduled. Additionally, you can launch them directly from here. All you need to do is choose the one that you would like to launch and then press the blue start button.
The very first time you join an online zoom meeting on a computer, confirm that you want to join with your computer audio. You need to make sure that you click on that button or else you will have a difficult time with audio. If you don’t want to see that pop-up in the future you can click on the little statement on the bottom. It allows you to automatically join that same way each time you enter Zoom.
The Zoom Toolbar
The bottom toolbar is where you will find some of the more frequently used tools such as microphone and webcam control. There are chat and participant functions as well as control over whether or not you want to pause or stop a recording. You can also find breakout rooms in the bottom toolbar. These are some items we’ll be going over in more detail in our next post. You will be able to view a mock lesson with students in the Zoom session. I’ll demonstrate how we can use some of these different tools.
Once you are finished in a Zoom session all you need to do to end things is go to the red words that say end meeting. At this point, you’ll have a few choices for how you can end the meeting. You can simply leave the meeting and allow other participants to continue. Or, you can end the meeting for everyone. This is the option that I use all the time. I want to avoid students alone and unattended in a Zoom session.
Well this is quite exciting! You have now learned how to launch your very first online zoom meeting. Coming up in the next post we are going to take a a closer look at those Zoom tools for hosting your Zoom meetings. I will have a few example students joining me in a Zoom session and we will do a mock lesson together to show you some of the different things that you can do. I’ll model some of the different ways that you can use Zoom in a classroom and hopefully help you as you are preparing to host your own.
