Zoom Best Practices
- Zoom DOs and DON'Ts
- Helpful Tips: Breakout Rooms must first be enabled only using your Web logon, (not the downloaded ZOOM client). Sign into your Zoom user account using the WEB page. https://us02web.zoom.us/signin
Then go to SETTINGS on Left Side and scroll way down until you see Breakout rooms and Enable and check the Box allow Host and then SAVE.
- Data Security
- Virtual Learning Live or Recorded Protocols v3
ZOOM DOs and DON'Ts
- Don’t use the Personal Meeting Identifier (PMI) for public meetings, use the Generate Automatically Meeting ID option; the link to your PMI does not change so once shared, others could potentially join your meeting by having the link
- If you are concerned about who you want attending, use a meeting password
- Enable waiting room in meeting settings and only let those in who you know; this is a virtual staging area that stops your guests from joining until you’re ready
- Monitor who is in the meeting, if you don’t know who they are, as a host, you can remove them from the meeting
- Don’t record or take screen shots of students especially if you are dealing with private information such as IEPs or 504s
- Chat, treat it just like email, don’t share personally identifiable information
Helpful Tips
- This short video is EXCELLENT for teacher basics! Click on the image below.
- Consider turning off annotation: You and your attendees can doodle and mark up content together using annotations during screen share. You can disable the annotation feature in your Zoom settings to prevent people from writing all over the screens.
- Don’t give up control of your screen. You do not want random people taking control of the screen and sharing unwanted content with the group. You can restrict this — before the meeting and during the meeting in the host control bar. To prevent participants from screen sharing during a call, using the host controls at the bottom, click the arrow next to Share Screen and then Advanced Sharing Options.
- These best practices for using Zoom are also applicable in most cases to other video teleconferencing platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Skype, etc
- Zoom does not sell user data, monitor meetings or contents, and complies with all applicable privacy laws, rules, and regulations, see Zoom privacy policy for more details
Data Security
Meeting data transmitted across the network when using Zoom is protected. Multi-layered access control for owner, admin, and members exist and access is protected by verified email address and password. As mentioned in the Do’s and Don’ts, do not record sessions or utilize chat when discussing sensitive information. Other platforms such as Synergy are available for storing student information.
In a meeting where all of the participants are using Zoom clients, and the meeting is not being recorded, all video, audio, screen sharing, and chat content is encrypted at the sending client and not decrypted at any point before it reaches the receiving clients. This emphasizes the importance of participant control. Zoom clients include a laptop or computer running the Zoom app as well as a smartphone using a Zoom app.
Additional Zoom resources: support.zoom.us.