By Rafael Robledo

Since most of the SDSU’s resources and all classes have moved to online sessions, most of them are using zoom for lectures, office hours and to schedule appointments for advising etc…. This week I will be presenting a tutorial on how to use zoom so that you won’t have to struggle for when you need to schedule an online appointment with someone. 

First of all what is Zoom? Zoom is an application that enables video communication for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat and webinars. For us, it makes things much easier during this time since SDSU gave us a free account that we can access through your Office 365  home page. You would need to click on the show all apps link and look for zoom, it should be at the bottom, and it will bring you to your zoom account. 

I recommend taking a look at settings so that you can personalize your zoom account to your liking. From here you should download Zoom into your pc by simply clicking host a meeting without video so that you can first test out and see how zoom works.Once you have the application downloaded, you can click on the settings, these are different. Here you can even set up some shortcuts for turning your video on, to muting, etc… I really recommend having a look at it so that you can personalize your account.

To join a meeting, you will either need the meeting ID or the other person’s personal link name. You should receive either one from the person when you are scheduling an appointment. An awesome feature from zoom is that you can screen share from your computer so that the other person can see what you are referring to and vice versa. When you click on the share screen button, you can select your whole pc screen or a specific tab. It’s a nice feature and a helpful one. 

I simply covered the basics and I hope that they help you out on starting out zoom. If you have any questions, you can always contact their support team or watch the online tutorial videos that they have as a reference on the online web page.