Resources to Help You Get Started in Zoom

Teaching and tutoring for Manhattan Prep has allowed me to get very familiar with Zoom. For the last two years, we’ve used Zoom for our online classes and tutoring. To help teachers and others who are now using this platform, we created some short guides based on the Zoom training that we provide for our instructors who teach online.

First, this blog post contains information about installing the Zoom software on your computer. If you’re not hosting a meeting or teaching a class in Zoom—you’re just attending one—this might be all of the information that you need.

If you will be teaching online or leading meetings in Zoom, take a look at the guides below. But before you do, consider these two important pieces of advice:

1. You don’t need to learn every feature and tool available. Learn how to use a few basic tools, just the ones that you absolutely need, and get comfortable with those. Later, if you want to expand your toolbox, you can explore other features.
2. Practice before your first class or meeting. Sign in to your online meeting room and practice with the tools and features that you plan to use. It’s ideal to get one or more friends, colleagues, or family members to join you in a meeting so that you see what it’s like to have others in the room with you. But even if you aren’t able to have others join you, spend some time practicing alone in the meeting room.

With that advice in mind, these guides can help you get started in Zoom:

Zoom Guide for Teachers — Zoom’s Help Center contains a huge amount of useful information, but it might be slightly overwhelming if you’ve never used Zoom before. This guide provides a list of articles that will help you get started.

Online Camera Tips — these tips can help if you teach online or hold meetings with any type of videoconferencing application, including Skype, Google Hangouts, Webex, or GoToMeeting.

How to Do Small Group Work in Zoom — this covers Zoom’s breakout room feature and provides advice for using it.

Teaching online can seem intimidating if you’ve never done it before. It’s possible that everything won’t go as smoothly as you want. You might experience some technical difficulties. You might find yourself feeling nervous, even if you’ve taught in person for years. Acknowledge and accept that these things might happen. Deal with them if they do. Take a breath, roll your shoulders a bit, and teach your lesson. You’ll be fine. With a bit of practice, you might even start to enjoy online classes.