 Welcome to today's webinar on Confer Zoom, the video conferencing tool that is taking the California Community Colleges by storm. Today we're going to be introducing you to the tool, going over a few of the features that people use often, and then introducing a few new features as well so that you could think about all the different ways that you might use this tool. Let me first start by giving you a little introduction to Zoom. Zoom is actually a private company, and we in the California Community Colleges are piloting its use under the brand Confer Zoom. But it's the exact same product as Zoom, so if you've used Zoom before, you might already be familiar with it. But for our purposes as educators in the CCCs, we want to use Confer Zoom because that gets us a free pro account. We'll talk a little bit later about how to get that account, but it's important that you use Confer Zoom rather than the regular Zoom. If you already have a regular Zoom account, by the way, the folks at CCC Confer can merge those accounts for you. So currently, we are using Confer Zoom for meetings like this one because we can all be in different locations as these three fine individuals are, but we can all see each other, have conversations, get work done, share our screens, etc. It's also being used for online conferences like the Digital Learning Day that's coming up on February 22nd. It'll be entirely in Zoom, and a lot of instructors are using it for office hours with their students because as you saw when you joined us today, it was just one click to get into Zoom, so it's very user-friendly. So what you're seeing here is what Zoom looks like when it is installed on your computer. So you will have this little app here, and speaking of apps, there are apps for your phone and your iPad or tablet as well. And so once it's downloaded on your computer, starting a Zoom session is as simple as just clicking one of these two orange buttons. You also can schedule Zoom sessions, and you can create email invites like the one you see here on the right that have everything that somebody would need to join in. And it's just as simple as deciding who to send it to and sending it off. So using Zoom from the presenter side is really not much more difficult than using it from the participant side. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about some of the features before we get into getting your account set up. So one thing to keep in mind is Zoom is used for a lot of different purposes. So in meetings, you might want to have something like the gallery view that you see here on the left where everybody is the same size, and they can all just chat with each other like they would in a face-to-face meeting. But there are other options as well. So the speaker view has the person who's speaking large and everybody else is in a film strip up at the top. There is a button you can use to switch between the two views throughout your Zoom meeting. So this is determined by the user, not by the person who's presenting. So a couple of other features that are used often in Zoom, the chat, which we have been using quite a bit already. Some things you may or may not know about the Zoom chat, you can use it to ask and to answer questions. So you can have a side conversation going on the chat with the other participants, perhaps with the presenter or moderator as well. And if you don't want to have it open as you see in this image, you can just let the chat icon light up as people leave new comments and you'll actually see a brief snippet of that comment when it is made. The other thing that a lot of people don't realize is you can have private conversations in the chat as well. So by default it's set up to go to everyone. But if you look at your chat window and see the little drop down there, you can choose to communicate with just one person if you'd like. So if you're helping somebody troubleshoot or somebody has a question that you would like to answer privately rather than to the whole group, you have that option. Another panel is the participants panel and that will show you a list of everybody who is in the Zoom. And if you are using the default view, you'll probably see the participant list right above the chat window. And there are some other things that you can do with the participant area besides see who's in there. There is a way that you can customize your name. So if you were logged in under somebody else's account, for example, or a company account, you might want to change your name. You can do that. You can also change to add on extra information like what college you're from. Then down at the bottom you see some other buttons that let you communicate yes or no if a question was asked or if you want the presenter to go slower or faster, etc. So let's take a minute to play with those buttons. First locate them so if you don't have the chat open yet, click on that chat button and then you should see the chat window and the participants above it. You do have the option to pop those out and put them in a different place on your screen, but by default they should show up on the right-hand side. So if you have found the participant window, go ahead and click on the yes button. That's the green check mark. And notice what happens when you do that. So we can see who has answered yes, which is nice for very informal polling. And well, those of you who have already found it are waiting for everybody else to find the yes. I wanted to show you what you can find under the more icon. So if you look where you see the yes and the no, just go over a little bit more to the right and you'll see another set of icons. You can do thumbs up, thumbs down. You can do a cup of coffee. And you guess what that means? It means a coffee break. So if you want a break, if you're in a meeting and you'd like a break, you can show the little coffee icon. So these are kind of fun for different purposes. All right. So think about how students might enjoy using those. It does have a social media fun element to it, but it also can be nice for things like just taking the pulse of the room, making sure everybody's still with you, keeping everybody engaged as you're going over information. One really popular feature of ConferZoom is screen sharing. So that's what I'm doing right now. You are seeing my screen rather than seeing each other. And so screen sharing, the location of how you do that is actually very close to where the chat is. It's the same general area, but it's a bright green icon. So you won't be able to share right now because I am, but just wait a few minutes. So to share a screen, when you click on that, you're going to see a box that pops up. And again, you won't be able to do that right now, which is why I took a screenshot of it to show you here. So when a person who has sharing privileges clicks on share screen, they'll see a box come up that gives them some options. It asks essentially, what do you want to share? So anything that's open on your desktop is something that you could share. So you can see all the things that were open on my desktop when I took this screenshot. And we're going to discuss several of these today. If you wanted to share a PowerPoint like I'm doing right now, you could have it open and you would just click on that image of your PowerPoint. Another option is to share a browser window that you have open. And that's especially nice if you wanted to play a video for your students. You could go to where the video is, you could turn it on full screen and you could play it. Notice these two boxes down at the bottom. One is to share your computer sound. So if you are playing a video, you'd want to have that checked. And the other one is to optimize for a full screen video clip. So if you were showing that full screen video, this will help make it a better viewing experience for the people in your Zoom room with you. And if you're going to be sharing all of those things and maybe a few more, I recommend that you share your desktop because that way you can just move things into view and it will continuously share whatever is visible on your desktop. If I were to share a PowerPoint and then share a video that was in my browser window and I didn't share my desktop, I would have to stop the sharing in order to go from the PowerPoint to the browser. So if you plan on sharing multiple things, you're best off sharing your desktop. If you think about trying to find a virtual equivalent of that office visit where you're sitting down with a student and going over things together side by side, Zoom is very, very close to that because you can see and hear each other as well as see each other's screens. If you are wondering how you can decide who gets to share and who doesn't, there is a little option in sharing screen for the presenter. So I'm able to see this where I can choose if I want one person to share or if I want multiple people to share. And as you can see, this little pop-up window comes up and we can see what our options are for that kind of sharing. So you can share, you can let your students share with you as well. Okay, so another dimension for screen sharing is a whiteboard. So Zoom has a whiteboard built into the program that you can choose to share. So we just shared our desktops and what we had on them. But another option is to share a whiteboard and use it to collaborate with the other people that you're meeting with. So it might look something like this. It just opens up a whiteboard. It gives you some tools and you could put up an equation. And as you look at this equation, you will see very clearly that I do not teach math. So this equation probably makes no sense and probably is impossible to solve for X. In any easy fashion. But I just wanted to show you what some of the tools are. So as you can see, you can type. You also can hand write as you see I did over here. You can set it up and then have students come in and do the work here. People can work here at the same time or individually. And as the facilitator, you can erase people's work if you need to. You can also with one click clear the entire board and then you're ready to do say the next problem. All right, so while you guys are doodling, I'm going to show you a couple of things that I can do. Because remember as the presenter, I have the controls. I can move things around if I want to. So I'm moving around some people's doodles right now. I can spotlight them. So if I want to say something like this square is very well designed. I can spotlight it so you can see that. And then for the eraser, I have the option to erase people's work as well. And I also have the option to undo it if I didn't need to erase it. So I'm displaying some of those things right now on some of the artwork that we have here. And then one last thing that you can do is you can save this whiteboard. So if people are actually doing a math problem, you could then save it and share those with everybody later. So one other feature that may be useful once in a while is remote control. So you could actually give control of your computer to the person that you are working with or the other way around. So this isn't something you would do in the course of a normal meeting. However, if you were troubleshooting with somebody, this could be really helpful. And so if you were interested in doing this, you would have the option to request remote control. If it is your Zoom room, you have the option to give control to one person in your room. And so Fernando is requesting control of my computer. So don't drain my bank accounts, but I'm going to give you control. So I'm going to sit back. I'm going to keep my hands up so you can see I'm not doing anything. Look at that. My mouse is moving. So if we were learning how to use a software program, think about the things that we could do to help each other. And by the way, he just opened up Microsoft Word. It came over on my second monitor. I'm just going to bring it over to show you what he has done. So remote control. And then of course I can take it back whenever I want to. Okay. So just when you're mulling over that idea, I want to bring in another one. This is new features. So now we're moving from features that have been well-loved in Zoom to some of the newer ones. One of them is a virtual background. So when you are sharing, you can actually change the background behind you if you want to. And as somebody who loves to make green screen videos, as some of you know, this was very exciting to me. So I'm going to stop my share and show you what that looks like. All right. Now I have a background that I never recommend for green screens, because it's the same color as parts of me. And so this green screen is not going to look fabulous, but I just want to show you how easy it is. So I am using the little arrow next to my video feed, and I am going to choose a virtual background. There it is. Hmm. As you can see, some parts of me are kind of close to the color of the wall. And as the lighting changes, it changes a little bit. But if I had a green screen behind me like, oh, I don't know. This one right here. No, hold on. I know I'm disappearing. I'm going to use the green screen technology here to say, this is the color I want you to take out Zoom. And look at that. There are other backgrounds that are prefab as well. There is this one if you want to be in the green grass. And there's also one of the Golden Gate Bridge. And then you can upload your own if you would like to. So I'll just quickly show you what those three look like. So if I actually had this green screen hanging behind me, I could do this for the whole session. And if I'm teaching a travel class, how great would it be to have this view behind me? This is where you would find the virtual background. It's right next to your video on, off. It would pop up this little menu and you have a virtual background. There are some other fun things in the video settings. I'll let you discover those on your own, but there are a few other tricks in there too. Okay. Another new feature is polls. So you can, as the facilitator of the meeting, you can use a poll. And so what you do when you choose to do a poll is first, you have to write it so you can write whatever questions you wanted. And then you activate the poll and people fill it out and you can share the results in the meeting live. So you can have as many questions as you want, but it's kind of a fun way to see who you have in your group, get some anonymous results back to make sure people are getting the content, or maybe even a list of topics for the day and you could let the people who are joining you choose the order of the topics based on their rankings in this poll. So lots of uses for it. Captioning. If you have students in your class or people in your meeting who need captioning, then this is the tool that you would use. And so right now, because Zoom is in a pilot with the committee college system, it's not hooked up to a third party captioning service, but the tool that we have that is not in the pilot, which is the original CCC confer, does have a captioner appointment process where you can request a captioner to join your session. So we hope that that will be part of Zoom as well, but we would need to get beyond the pilot for that to happen. In the meantime, you can assign somebody in your group to be the captioner, or you can do it yourself. And a little window that looks a lot like this pops up and you just type in whatever is being said. So it's a little more labor intensive now because we don't have a captioner that we can invite into the session, but we do have the ability to do the captions there. And another one which we won't have time to play with today, and you might not use very often, especially if you're mostly using this for office hours, but if you had a whole class in here who was able to meet at the same time, you could do breakout rooms. So if you're at SIG, you have a face-to-face or a hybrid class, and you're bringing your students to a lab, this might be an option that you could really use. So if you choose to do breakout rooms, this little window pops up, and you can choose how many different breakout rooms you want. You can have Zoom put people in them automatically, or you can do it manually if you want certain people to work together. So this is an option just to keep in mind for when you have those larger groups. All right, so let's talk about how to get your account then. So what we have been looking at is Zoom from a pro account view. A pro account lets you have up to 100 people in your Zoom room, and lets you have that meeting for as many minutes as you need to. Now Zoom, the company, does have a free account, but it limits both of those things, the number of people and the amount of time. So you really want to take advantage of the confer Zoom option because that will give you the full pro account and you'll have all these features. So the way that you do that is you go to confer Zoom.org. This is the page that you will go to, and you will click on sign up, and then you will see this very short form to fill out. So your first name, your last name, the email is the most important line. If you use your college email account, that will allow them to verify you as a member of the system. With a personal email account, you won't be able to get a confer Zoom account. Once you fill out this form, you're going to get an email at that email address as soon as you have been processed, and by clicking the link in that email, then you will complete the setup for your account. Once you have your account, then you will be able to go into the guides to learn about how to host a session on confer Zoom. So there's a guide here that goes over a lot of the stuff that we were doing today, and underneath that are specific guides for different purposes. Like if you want to record a session, here's how you do that. If you want to assign somebody to be the host of a meeting because you have to go, it'll tell you how to do that. So there are lots of features that we didn't cover today that you will see covered down here. And I'm just going to click on one so that you can see what it brings you to. It's just a standalone little guide. This one is one page long. You can print it out, and it will walk you through how to do that particular thing in Zoom. So this is a great website to bookmark so that you have all that information handy. So when you have your Zoom account, you are able to sign in, and these are some of the things that I recommend that you do. One is I recommend you put a picture in, because if you turn off your video, that picture will take your place. So people can still see that you're there. You can see your Zoom ID down here. So notice it has the cccconfer.zoom.us, and this is my meeting room number. So I can share this number with people so they can join me in my Zoom room. I also could just share the link, and they could click on it to go in my Zoom room. If you want to personalize it with maybe your name instead of the numbers, you have that option. Over on this side, so I'm in this left panel now, under Meetings and Meeting Settings, there are lots of ways that you can customize your account. So this is where you can do things like set up a waiting room. If you want to admit people into your room instead of just having them go in as soon as they click the link, this is where you can decide if you want to allow certain video options. So read through these and think about which ones would work best for the purposes that you are interested in, and you can always go back and change these too. You'll see that there's a time zone here as well, so there are lots of ways that you can customize your account once you have it. You just go into the Settings area. And then the last thing that I wanted to talk about, and then we can play around a little bit if you'd like, is how to use ConferZoom for office hours in your Canvas class. So most people start using ConferZoom for office hours because it's a very easy way to connect with students, and you have two options. The first option is to share that link. So remember, you got a link right here, and you can just share that with your students, maybe on your home page. So this is an example of my home page, and I created a link called Virtual Office, and I put in my ID for Zoom, and then students can click on it and go right into my Zoom room. So that's option number one, and you could share that link anywhere. It could be in announcements to remind people of your office hours later in the day. You could share it wherever you'd like because it's a link. Option number two is you could use the ConferZoom app that is in Canvas, but let me give you a couple caveats about that. If you use the ConferZoom app, it does show up on your course menu, which is kind of handy, but it won't let you use your Zoom room address. It will generate a random one for each office hour you set up. So that makes it a little tricky sometimes for students to get to you because they would have to log into the class, go to the ConferZoom link, scroll down and see what the date is, and then click a button to get into the Zoom room. So I actually prefer just using my one Zoom room link that I can share wherever I'd like, and my students know to meet me there. ConferZoom is working on updating that app, but for right now, just know if you use it, you cannot use your personal meeting ID. It'll generate a new one each time. To learn more about the ConferZoom app in Canvas, you can go to the guides on the ConferZoom website, and you'll find the last one in the row is for the Canvas integration. And while you're here, if you ever get stuck with Zoom or have questions, you can click on the Support tab to get the support information for the folks at CCCConfer who can help you with ConferZoom. Okay, that's it for this webinar. Thank you so much for joining us, and happy Zooming!