Table of Contents
About Zoom Host
As a Zoom Meeting Host, you have special administrator privileges. The host controls will appear at the bottom of your screen if you are not currently screen sharing as shown below.
You can also make a participant of the meeting a co-host who can assist in running the meeting doing things such as muting/unmuting participants, letting people in from the waiting room if you choose to use a waiting room, or recording the meeting.
A Co-Host has all of the same admin privileges as shown in the rest of this tutorial, EXCEPT for the following:
- Start closed captioning and assign someone or a third-party to provide closed captioning
- Start live streaming
- End meeting for all participants
- Make another participant a co-hostStart waiting-room (co-hosts can place participants in waiting room or admit/remove participants from the waiting room)
Co-hosts also cannot start a meeting. If a host needs someone else to be able to start the meeting, they can assign an alternative host.
The following tutorial will explain the controls that you as a host have including Security and Participants controls, Screen Sharing, Recording the Meeting, Closed Captioning and Breakout Rooms . To learn more in depth about the options available, see corresponding Service Desk Articles, or visit the Zoom online portal.
Host Tools
The Security Menu gives options for what the host allows the participants to:
- Lock Meeting: Locks the meeting, keeping new participants from joining the meeting. This should be left off usually
- Enable Waiting Room: Enables Waiting Room for incoming new participants or to move current participants into the Waiting Room. If the Waiting Room is enabled, participants will first pop up in a “waiting-room” sub menu of the participants menu, and must be manually let into the session
- Hide Profile Pictures: Hide all profile pictures, including the host. Display names are shown instead
Allow participants to:
- Share Screen: Allows participants to share their screens
- Chat: Allows participants to use the chat function
- Rename Themselves: Allows participants to rename themselves from the Participants panel
- Unmute Themselves: Allows participants to unmute themselves without the host's permission
- Start Video: Allows participants to start their video in the meeting
Participants
The button to the right of the security button turns on the “Participants” Window, which will appear to the right of your zoom screen. On the top left arrow of that window you can click that and “pop out” the window to be able to move it around wherever you want.
On the bottom of the participants window is a convenient “Mute All” button and also an “Invite” button.
The “Invite” button brings you to a screen where you can enter a Zoom users email account and Zoom will invite them via email, or you can click the “Copy Invite Link” on the bottom left of the page and it will copy a link to your clipboard that you can paste to someone else, say in an instant messenger app or in an email.
The ellipses button will expand additional options.
- Ask all to unmute: Display a pop-up notification to all muted participants with option to unmute themselves or stay muted
- Mute participants upon entry: Automatically mute participants as they join the meeting. This is HIGHLY RECCOMENDED, as a meeting host doesn’t want participants to accidentally say or share things as they come into the meeting not knowing that their microphones are active.
- Allow participants to unmute themselves: Participants can unmute themselves if they want to speak to others in the meeting.
- Allow participants to rename themselves: Participants can change their screen name displayed to other participants.
- Play sound when someone joins or leaves: Play a sound when participants join and leave the meeting
- Enable waiting room: Enable the Waiting Room feature. This option is available regardless of the web portal setting.
- Hide profile pictures: Hides participants profile pictures.
- Lock meeting: Don't allow other participants to join the meeting in progress.
In the Participant Window if we click on a Participant it will bring up a sub menu with individual controls for that Participant. Click the “more” button to see all of the options available as shown below.
Screen Sharing
On the up arrow of the Share icon, you can quickly set if you want only one participant to be able to share at a time, or if multiple participants can share simultaneously. Click the "Advanced Sharing Options" to get to this screen shown below.
Here the host can decide if Participants are allowed to share their screens at all, and if so the "Who can start sharing when someone else is sharing" will stop participants from accidentally interrupting each other.
Recording
This allows the host or co-host to start or stop a cloud or local recording.
More
The More icon will allow the host to enable Transcript and Captions, manage Breakout rooms, create/run Polls/quizzes.
Captions
If you have enabled closed captioning or live transcript for your account, click the Captions icon to access the closed caption options.
Breakout Rooms
Here you as the meeting host can create or open your pre-assigned breakout rooms. See the help desk articles "Pre-Assigning Breakout Rooms in Zoom" or "Creating Breakout Rooms During a Zoom Meeting" for further detail.
Polls/Quizzes
If you created polls or quizzes prior to the meeting, you can share them. If you did not create a poll or quiz prior to the meeting, you can click the "Create" button to begin.