Tips to Master in Zoom
By: Julie Xu
Tags: How To Use, Online Presentation, Beginners Guide, Zoom

Under the coronavirus situation, a lot of people have to work at home, relying on remote working platforms such as Zoom. But as a beginner to Zoom, I have encountered a few embarrassing moments in Zoom for inappropriate usage. For example, I forgot to mute myself in class so that everyone in class heard my murmur clearly; my face flushed in a second when the instructor called my name. More than that, in one presentation, my group partner was in an awful environment setting and used an all-back virtual background: when he smiles, there’s a black hole on his teeth.

Reflected upon my experiences in Zoom, I have summarized a list of helpful tips you can use, as a paticipant or presenter.

Tips for Participants:

1. Mute when you are not talking.

Sometimes, when you press the space button for a while, your microphone would unmute automatically and your voice would be heard by everyone. Be sure that you don’t press anything by mistake, or others in the meeting would be distracted by your noise!

Microphone Off

You have been muted, and others cannot hear you talking. You can click on the icon to unmute yourself.

Microphone On

You are unmuted and ready to talk. You can click here to mute yourself.

2. Turn on the camera for better interactions.

Don’t be shy to show your beautiful faces! Facial expressions are very helpful to the meeting, both for speakers and listeners.

Camera On

Your camera is on, and everyone can see your face.

Camera Off

Your camera is off, and people can only see your name displayed in the gallery.

Camera Off

3. Raise your hands in the participant list if you have questions.

When you are having a meeting with a large group of people, you won’t be noticed by physically raising your hands. Instead, you can raise hands to notify the meeting host in the participant list.

a. Go to the participant list.

Paticipant List

b. Click on the blue hand icon at the bottom of the list.

The Bottom of Participant List

c. After that, you can see a blue hand displayed next to your name on the list, which means you have successfully raised your hands.

You have successfully raised your hand.

Tips for Presenters:

1. Make sure you are in a good setting

A good presentation environment would make you look more energetic, confident, and comfortable, which helps to double the persuasion of your speech.

2. Use your slides as a virtual background

“What kind of virtual background should I use for today’s presentation?” This is the question that bothered me for every presentation I make. Using a professional virtual background could add value to your presentation.

Meanwhile, as a listener, even with a neat background, I don’t feel like watching an engaging offline presentation most of the time. Why? Because I am easily distracted by the lecturer image and slides on separate windows.

Sample of Using PPT as Virtual Background

However, here’s one way to embed the speaker into the slide — using PowerPoint slides as a virtual background!

a. Click “Share Screen”.

b. Click “Advanced” shown in the middle of the top.

c. Click “PowerPoint as Virtual Background”.

d. You can drag your image to everywhere on the screen.

You are one step to the best speaker!

By applying this format, your audience would not be bothered to adjust their set to watch your presentation and slides at the same time. Also, they won’t be distracted by your virtual background and able to concentrate more on the content. However, your animation on slides won’t be displayed if you use it as background. So, if the animation is significant in the presentation, you need to create more slides to show animations step by step.

3. Set up polling questions for interactions

Indeed, listeners can hardly follow up for a long time in a virtual setting, but with polling questions, they can pause for a while and reflect on the previous content. In short, Slicing your presentation with meaningful questions is a good approach to improve presentation quality.

4. Avoid technical issues

Technical issues always have negative impacts on the quality of the presentation as they would cut down your content and disrupt listeners’ attention. Thereby, it’s important to prevent as many technical problems as possible. An easy and effective way is to have a dry run before the final presentation, checking whether your microphone, camera, and Internet connection work smoothly. Also, if you enter the Zoom meeting with two devices, don’t forget to “double” mute one device (e.g. turn on the silent mode on your device and turn off the microphone on Zoom). Otherwise, there would be a terrible echo noise when you are presenting.

5. Don’t forget to share the sound when you are presenting with videos

When sharing screens, presenters may easily forget to share sounds. When clicking on the button of “share screen”, at the left bottom of the jump-up page, you can find a little click-box for sharing sound. Be careful that you have closed all other software with sounds such as email or social media platforms; otherwise, every audience can hear the notification sound when you receive a message or email.