Zoom is Golden Gate College’s synchronous virtual meeting tool. Using Zoom allows you to hold meetings and class sessions in real-time through the internet. Zoom has quickly become one of the most popular “webinar” tools at colleges and universities. Thousands of campuses around the world have come to rely on this technology for online class sessions and remote work.

With Zoom you can host meetings of up to 300 people at a time. Everyone has the opportunity to participate in meetings with high fidelity audio and video sharing, making it the next-best thing to meeting in person.

As an instructor you can share your screen including PowerPoints, websites, software, videos – virtually anything on your computer – and even ask your students to do the same.

To promote the sorts of active learning techniques you do in regular class sessions like promoting small group work or utilizing student response systems (clickers), Zoom has features like breakout rooms, polling, and even shared digital whiteboards.

Even if you just want an easy way to create a PowerPoint lecture video, Zoom can work for you. You can start a meeting, hit record, share your screen, and deliver your presentation with no one present, then share the recording URL when it’s ready (to make this easier – remember to record to the Cloud).

To get started hosting meetings, all you need to do is go to https://zoom.us to link you Golden Gate College. Once you’ve done that, you can link your Zoom and Canvas accounts by visiting the Zoom tool in Canvas (see video below). You can use Zoom for hosting online class sessions, office hours, committee meetings, etc. And the best part is, your participants (including students) do not need a Zoom account to join you. As long as they have the URL for the Zoom meeting you’ve created, anyone can join in a Zoom session.

Just like Canvas, there is a lot to Zoom. The basics of scheduling and starting a meeting are pretty easy to learn, so start there. As you get more comfortable, you can learn some of the additional functionality, like polling and breakout rooms.

Click on the topics to the right for resources related to some of the most common things instructors who are new to Zoom find most helpful.