Introduction to Zoom (part 2)

1. Schedule your meeting

We saw in the previous document how to invite people to your meeting.

It’s very convenient to be able to schedule a meeting for obvious reasons. To do that, first, press the big Schedule button.

Then change the settings according to your preferences.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Choose Repeat if your class occurs every week at the same time.
2. Avoid any external annoyance by getting a password.
3. Enable (by default) Waiting Room option. Therefore, you only accept the person you can fully identify as a student of yours.
4. In the Advance settings, toggle on Automatically Record Meeting.

2. Send an invitation

Once you have scheduled your conference, you need to invite people.

Again, there are many ways to do that. The most obvious one is to put the link in Google Classroom.

But, as I wanted my students to be more organised and autonomous, I end up using Google Calendar so students could create an event or a reminder (consequently, they’ll see the reminder each day until they mark the work as done). Makes sense?

So here’s my solution.

We are going to use Google Contacts & Google Calendar.

Google Contacts

First, you need to fetch all students email addresses (ask the IT department).

Then visit Google Contacts website and choose Create contact > Create multiple contact.

When this is done, you just have to paste the recipients and to create a label (which will be your class). That way, when you want to send an invitation in Gmail, all you will have to do is to put the label in the recipient field. No need to copy and paste 25 email addresses.

Except I don’t need to launch Gmail. Instead, I use Google Calendar.

Google Calendar

To begin with, create an event.

Choose More options:

And then add the recipients (your label in Google contacts will automatically add all your contact students).

Change some settings. For instance, the event can repeat weekly.

Insert the invite link (don’t forget the password).

⚠️ Google will automatically and slyly add a Google Meet invitation in your event. This is confusing for the students. So don’t forget to remove it (unless you prefer Google Meet over Zoom).

By the way, as we have a G Suite account, one can insert a Zoom event in your calendar thanks to this little button.