An Educator’s Guide to Using Zoom in the Classroom

Educators, find all the tools and resources you need for creating an engaging learning experience with Zoom.

You’ll learn how to set up your virtual classroom, use security settings to help enable safe learning environments, and communicate the benefits of Zoom to parents and students. Get familiar with all the features and teaching tools available to have fun and connect in and out of the classroom!

• Make sure you create your individual account under your organization’s Zoom account. Use the sign-up steps provided by your school’s Zoom administrators (or reach out to admins if you have not yet received instructions).
  • Sign-up steps may be different for each school, so it’s important to follow the process provided by your admins. Most schools will be utilizing external authentication, which requires everyone using Zoom to sign in through the school’s Single Sign-On (SSO) Identity Provider to access their meetings.

Learn more about the Zoom PWA for Chrome OS

You can also use your Zoom credentials to login to the Zoom web portal, where you can customize your settings, schedule meetings, and create polls. Sign in at zoom.us/signin.

Check out our support page for a breakdown of the differences between the Zoom desktop client and Zoom web portal.

Depending on your system settings, this may make it possible for anyone with the meeting ID or passcode to access the meeting if they have this information.

Read this blog for more tips on how to help secure your virtual classroom.

At any time before or during a meeting, you can disable or enable chat, or restrict who students can chat with. By disabling private chat, you will be able to see all chats, helping to prevent students from getting picked on and reducing any potential side chatter.

When in-meeting chat is enabled, you can auto-save chats to make sure you don’t miss any messages and can circle back as needed. If a student makes an inappropriate remark, the chat log can be given to admins for review and follow-up.

Not every class needs to look the same. Zoom gives you the flexibility to choose how you want video feeds to appear to your students. Integrating different views can help students stay engaged and may even help with learning outcomes.

Students will see the same view you are using. If you change from Speaker View to Gallery View, your students’ view will also change. This is a great view to use when you want to make sure everyone is looking at the same thing.

This feature allows only the host to see participants’ videos, profile pictures, and shared screens. In Focus Mode, students will only be able to see the teacher, allowing them to feel comfortable in their own environment and be free from distractions. This mode is also ideal for proctoring exams.

Teachers and students can take advantage of Zoom’s accessibility features to meet their needs and make the most out of every Zoom session. Here’s how we make Zoom accessible for individuals with different needs:

Use keyboard shortcuts to easily navigate our features with just your keyboard.

We follow the latest accessibility standards to help make Zoom accessible to the latest screen readers. You can also use screen reader alerts to play custom notifications for specific actions.

Zoom’s Live Transcription feature automatically provides captions, or schools can use a third-party closed captioning service. Participants can also anonymously request to enable Live Transcription in a class or meeting.

Use multi-pinning to customize your view — this allows students to pin an instructor and sign language interpreter, for example. Note that you do need to allow individual students to multi-pin on their video layout. Click the Participants icon in the meeting toolbar, hover over the student’s name, click More, then Allow to Multi-pin.

Zoom offers general and advanced live training to help you polish your skills and feel comfortable using all the features available to you.

Use Breakout Rooms for small-group learning, reading groups, collaborative projects, and more. There are so many ways to set up and use Breakout Rooms — you can even have students select their own rooms, pre-assign rooms before class, or assign them at random.

All You Need to Know About Using Zoom Breakout Rooms

Chat enables students with different communication styles to be recognized. Encourage students to put their questions or share ideas in the chat (and remember, you can control settings and disable private chat to avoid distractions or inappropriate conversations).

Students can virtually raise their hand, indicate “Yes” or “No” next to their name, or request that you speed up or slow down your lesson, without disrupting the rest of the class. These types of nonverbal feedback are persistent, meaning they’ll appear on the student’s video until you clear it.

Use polls to gauge students’ understanding of a subject, measure interest on a topic, or have a quick pop quiz! You can set up polls before your class and download results after.

Give students a way to express themselves without saying a word! Students can choose an emoji reaction to pop up on their video panel to show their excitement, cheer on another student, or show love for a topic. They can even choose their reaction skin tone.

Share content on your desktop, specific windows or applications, or just a portion of your screen with your students. This allows you to show videos (with audio), images, slides, text documents, web pages, and other content for your lesson.

Liven up your presentation by inserting yourself into your slides! You can set your slides as a virtual background and move your video image anywhere within your presentation for an immersive, dynamic lesson.

Virtual backgrounds can promote education equity and help students protect the privacy of their home environment so they can feel more comfortable turning on their camera. Your school may have branded backgrounds with their logo, mascot, and colors, or you can get creative and use themed backgrounds that act as a backdrop for specific lesson plans. Administrators can even allow students to only use a specific set of school-approved backgrounds.

You can choose to share a blank whiteboard and write on it during your lesson. If annotation is enabled for students, they can also draw, make shapes, or type on the whiteboard, making it a great tool for creative activities or collaboration.

Zoom has lots of engagement features to help you interact with your students and encourage different ways of communicating. Get to know a few of the tools in your Zoom teaching toolkit and learn more about how to use them in your classroom.

Here’s a sample email you can use when introducing Zoom to your class and parents. Simply copy, paste, and customize the email to your audience.

Security is a primary concern for parents. You can let parents know about the settings your school has enabled in order to help create a secure learning environment that students feel safe in.

Setting a few ground rules for your virtual or hybrid classroom can help students learn digital etiquette and enhance their learning experience. Introduce these rules at the beginning of the year so students have clear expectations for how to act, whether they’re physically in the classroom or learning remotely.

• Turn your camera on during class whenever possible so everyone can see and interact with each other.
• If you’re not actively speaking, stay on mute.
• Listen carefully to others and don’t interrupt/talk over them.
• Use the Raise Hand feature if you would like to speak.
• Speak loudly and clearly so everyone in person and online can hear you.
• Be respectful of others while using chat. If you wouldn’t say something in person, don’t say it in chat!
• If you’re physically in the classroom, help remote students feel included by talking with them, speaking clearly so they can hear, and looking at the camera so they can see you.

Check out this blog for more hybrid learning tips.