- [Scott] My previous
Zoom videos have received over 1 1/2 million views and thousands and thousands of comments. So in today's video, I
wanted to answer five of the most frequently asked
questions I've received over the last few months. We're gonna talk about everything about managing participants
to broadcasting, to our breakout rooms, and
even some tips and tricks that you probably hadn't heard of before all in today's video. Hello everyone, Scott
Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress. And yes, you may be seeing
a few different versions of me today because I wanted to show a few real world examples. And so I have myself on a
separate computer on my iPad here next to me as I go through some of your most
frequently asked questions. And we're gonna kick things
off with the comment section. And one of the most frequently
asked questions I get is Scott are private messages
within the chat window, actually private? Now I get the feeling
that many of the people who are asking this have
been students perhaps, and people who are maybe
on other people's calls and can the host really
see what we're saying? When we say private in here,
does it actually mean private? Well, the good news is yes. The host cannot see private messages either during the meeting
or even post the meeting. They truly are private. But let's take a look at
some of the other options that we have down here. So by default, when you
open up the chat window, it is going to list everyone. And that's usually the most
common way that we use messages here within Zoom chat. If I'm the host, I'm sending
a message out to everyone. And if I'm a participant,
maybe I wanna ask a question and I want other people
to know what I'm asking or if other people agree
and that type of thing. But I can always use this dropdown and select a specific participant. So if I wanna say
something directly to Jack, I can just say, "Hi, Jack." And yeah, this time I'm going
to spell his name correctly. And we can have a conversation. We can have a discussion
back and forth if necessary. However, there's an easier way to do this, especially if you have a
large number of participants. And that is, let's say that we're back on this everyone's setting and I wanna say something to Jack. I don't wanna go through
this dropdown menu. And if there's 30 or 40 people in here, what I can do is I can actually
just click on this link, Jack's iPad, and it's
gonna automatically select that down below. So now I can continue my conversation or select someone else to do so as well. So that moves us on to tip number two. And this has to do with managing
participants in particular. And if you are the host, you may find it a little frustrating when people have cryptic
names as their usernames. So here I've got Jack's iPad. Well, what if there's more than one Jack? Or I know more than one Jack
or what if it's even worse? What if it's something like iPhone 23, something along those lines? Well, what you can do is
you can rename anyone here within your participant
list, if you are the host. So if I click on More,
I can come down here and select Rename. Now you may be asking yourself what if it's a long list, Scott and here this person
doesn't have a profile pic? What if I'm not sure which Jack this is or which individual it is? Well, what you can do is come up here and here you can see Jack's iPad. I can click on this little blue button and I can say Rename as well. I often use this more frequently because I'm actually
looking at the person. If their webcam is on, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I know it's Jack this is. This is Jack Smith. Okay, we're gonna say OK. Perfect, now it's renamed. Now, it's easier for me to
see both in the chat window down below if I need to
make him a presenter, whatever I need to do, if I'm interacting with this individual. So as the host, if you find it confusing, or if you're not sure
of someone's username, once you do find out, you can always go in and rename it yourself. Sticking with participants
and how we interact in view participants. Let's take a look at how we
can view those participants in a few different ways. So I'm gonna go here and
actually share my screen because often that's what
we're doing here within Zoom. And by default, typically you'll have just this small webcam window that will come up either in the top right corner, maybe the lower right hand corner. And it will typically
show the active speaker, showing me at this point in time. But we do have a few additional options. We can choose this thumbnail view here, which is gonna give us a
bit of a vertical list. Now I only have one other
person in this meeting example. So I'm only gonna see the two of us. It usually maxes out at
about four videos at a time. And then you can scroll through if you want to take a look at more. And don't forget that you can
drag this wherever you like. If it's more comfortable
or if you need to get it out of the way as you're presenting. Now, if you don't like the vertical view, what you can do is you can
drag this down to the bottom and it's going to adjust and
give us more of a linear, more of a horizontal view here. Again, we can click and
drag and move that around. If we wanna go back to vertical, you just sorta have to smash it. You have to push it to
the right hand side. So that's dragged to the right
if you want the vertical, drag to the bottom, if
you want the horizontal. And you can put it in a
variety of different ways. But of course you can also
minimize this altogether and hide the thumbnail view. Here it's gonna show me who is talking. I'm actively talking, so
it's gonna let me know. And if I'm listening to
other individuals as well, but I usually prefer one
of these other two options. The other thing that I
like to point out with when you're using this single view is that you can only drag
this anywhere on your screen. If you have a webcam dead
center on your screen, you can even drag it up
into or high parts of it so that you're looking almost
directly at the webcam. Now, in my case, my webcam
is slightly off to the right. So if I drag this over
here, it looks almost as if I'm looking at you straight in the face. I'm actually looking at
my thumbnail on my screen at the moment. But this can be a great tip if
you want to be more engaging with your audience, be more
engaging with your participants. All right, next on our list has to do with something called breakout rooms. And I have an entire video
showing you everything you need to know about breakout rooms. I'll leave a link for
it in the description, and also here in the top
right hand corner as well. But a common question that I receive when it comes to breakout rooms, Is Scott, can I present to
all of the breakout rooms? If I create, let's say three
breakout rooms as the host, can I present my slides? Can I talk to everybody? Well, I've got some bad news for you. And that is unfortunately not. As of the recording of this video, you cannot broadcast store share slides, or actually address everyone using audio to all of those breakout rooms. However, now that I've
initiated my breakout rooms, what you can do is send
them all a message. Down here on the lower left,
there is something that says Broadcast a message to all. And if I select that, it's just gonna be a simple text field, and I can say "Hello, we
will be wrapping things up in five minutes." Maybe just give them a warning
or something like that. And I can broadcast that out. Now, all of my rooms,
all of my participants are going to receive that message. That's the best that Zoom
can do in this point in time. Perhaps in the future,
they'll give us the ability to actually broadcast things
to everyone individually. But this Broadcast message
to all can be a great way to make sure that those rooms are on pace. Maybe you can remind them to move on to discussion question number three, something along those lines. Or maybe you can share a
question that one of the rooms that you jumped into
and joined for a moment and you thought was
relevant, you can share with others as well. So don't forget about this
Broadcast message to all feature. The last and final tip I
wanna share with you today is a common question
I receive about polls. And if you'd like to
learn more about polls, I'll leave a link to my screen share tips because polls are a great way
to make your Zoom meetings that much more interactive. For our poll settings, what
we need to do is actually jump into our Zoom account
on our desktop browser. In order to do that, you
need to go to Zoom.us. Now, when you're within your Zoom account, you wanna come down to Meetings and you're probably already
familiar with this area. This might be where you
schedule new meetings or see the previous meetings
that you've had as well. But if you want to be
able to repurpose a poll, you don't want to attach that
poll to a specific meeting. Otherwise that's the only
place where that poll is going to exist. That's the only place
where you're gonna be able to access that poll. So instead, I encourage you to go to your personal meeting room. If you are using your
personal meeting room, that's the same link, right? That's the same meeting
ID time and time again. And all you need to do is
scroll down to the bottom here to the poll section. And here you can see I've
already created two polls and I can say Add, and I can
start to add a brand new poll. The great thing here is
that when I add this poll, when I create these polls, I can repurpose them and reuse
them time and time again. So I don't have to create
them from scratch every time. I can use them as long as I'm using my personal meeting room,
not a unique meeting with its own ID, something
that I've created from scratch. So if you wanna repurpose those polls, make sure to use your personal meeting ID. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's tips. And I'd love to hear
further Zoom questions that you may have. Be sure to ask them and let
me know in the comments. I may just make a new video
and give you the answer in an upcoming video. Thank you so much for
watching today's video. And don't forget to subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Remember being productive
does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
