Zoom for Students
Introduction
Zoom is one of the three communication tools used at the university for synchronous communication. Blackboard Collaborate and Webex are the other tools. On this page, you will learn various tips and tricks to help you navigate Zoom and be more effective.
Zoom has a wonderful support page that can address a number of questions and concerns.
Technical support is provided by UMB CITS at 410-706-HELP or help@umaryland.edu and be sure to check their information page.
Muting/Unmuting
As a student, one of the main things you will need to manage is muting/unmuting your microphone. It is typically good class etiquette to keep your microphone muted except to ask or answer a question or to share laughter/applause. It is essential to mute if you are typing, eating, drinking, or have any types of noise or disturbances in your vicinity during meetings.
Basic Zoom Settings
There are some basic Zoom settings you should be familiar with to ensure you have a successful Zoom session.
Log in at https://umaryland.zoom.us with your SSO UMID login.
Click Sign In to configure your account.
Choose Settings on the left-hand navigation menu.
Take a few moments to explore all of the settings. Our favorite ones appear in the table below:
Setting
Description
This helpful feature allows you to automatically mute others as they enter. This is helpful when lecturing or presenting so you and the rest of the class are not interrupted because of errant audio.
The Personal Meeting ID is a standard room ID that can be easily remembered and used frequently. This is helpful if you are meeting with a lot of people and want one link to remember.
Sound notifications as people enter can be annoying for all. This reduces the notification to hosts and co-hosts or if toggled off, will completely silence.
A really helpful tool to ensure that your participants are engaged - you can use polls to assess learning or introduce fun trivia mental breaks.
A very popular tool not found in Webex or Blackboard Collaborate that allows participants to break into smaller groups which allows greater collaboration. The host can bring the groups back at any time or set an automatic timer.
There are a number of additional features and settings. We encourage you to explore all of the settings and play with the features.
Recurring Meetings/Classes
We recommend setting 1 meeting up as a recurring meeting for each class and posting the invite information (URL, password, phone number dial in info) into an item in your Blackboard course and/or your syllabus, so that students can go there every week to join your session with ease. (Non-recurring meeting links will expire 30 days after they are created.)
You CANNOT host multiple meetings at once using your one account.
Personal Room
You can set up a link to your own personal room that you can use whenever you need to have a meeting. To do so:
Log in at https://umaryland.zoom.us with your SSO UMID login.
Click on the Profile tab (upper left)
Click Customize to the right of the Personal Link and enter the personal link name you'd like to use.
Click the Meetings tab and then the Personal Meeting Room tab.
Edit the Meeting Password if desired
You can give people your personal meeting link and the password OR you can highlight and copy the Invite Link (which contains the personal meeting link AND the encrypted meeting password in 1 link).
You can also, if you like, create a tiny URL to your personal meeting using is.gd, tinyurl.com or other URL shorteners to make an easy to remember short link to your meeting room. Paste that longer link into one of them, choose a personalized URL ending, and submit.
Breakout Rooms
Here is a great video on how to use Breakout rooms in Zoom:
And here are the basic steps:
Start an instant or scheduled meeting.
Click breakout rooms.
Select the number of rooms you would like to create, and how you would like to assign your participants to those rooms:
Automatically: Let Zoom split your participants up evenly into each of the rooms.
Manually: Choose which participants you would like in each room.
Click Create breakout rooms.
2. Your rooms will be created, but will not start automatically. You will need to do that using these steps:
3. Start the rooms. All participants will be moved to their respective rooms after confirming the prompt to join the breakout room. The host will be left in the main meeting until manually joining one of the rooms. The participants (and the host when manually joining a room) will see the following message shown when joining the breakout room.
Pronouns
Aside from faculty resetting their meeting settings to allow students to rename themselves (or which is quickly done on the fly by clicking the Security badge icon in the zoom menu bar between Stop/Start Video and Participants and checking Allow Rename Themselves) , there is a more permanent solution:
Go to https://umaryland.zoom.us and sign in with UMID
Click the profile image in upper right corner (or go directly to https://umaryland.zoom.us/profile )
Click Edit to the right of your name
Go to the Pronouns section, enter preferred pronouns and
Select an option from the dropdown about when to display them: (always, ask every time, do not share)
Click Save.
In this way, if folks choose always or ask every time, this is set before they even enter a meeting, so it doesn't matter whether the settings for the meeting allow name changes or not.
The other alternative here is to just enter the pronouns at the end of the Display Name in the profile and that will be how students names are displayed in all meetings.
Recording
Zoom can record to the cloud or locally to your computer. We recommend the cloud. To enable cloud recording, you must visit your settings in zoom and enable the various types of cloud recordings you want to use . Only the host can record - and you must be signed into the Zoom client with your UMB (use the SSO sign in option with umaryland.zoom.us). See more recording info on Zoom's site: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/sections/200208179-Recording
If you plan to share your screen and create a recording with slides, be sure when you visit the settings in Zoom to check the boxes for cloud recording layouts that include active speaker and shared window.
If you are creating an interview video with 2 people or more, you most likely want to record the Gallery View - so be sure that box is checked (BEFORE Recording) in the settings (per above under recording layouts).
UMB Zoom recordings have automated transcripts and closed captioning.
All recordings are found in your web browser zoom settings, and review how to share them.
Zoom Support
Zoom has a wonderful support page that can address a number of questions and concerns.
Technical support is provided by UMB CITS at 410-706-HELP or help@umaryland.edu and be sure to check their information page.
In terms of strategizing how to best use Zoom in your classes or practicing using it, the IDEA Team is here to support you.