Zoom Tutoring

This is a guide to conducting after-hours tutoring remotely, starting with a zoom installation and finishing once your personal meeting room is configured. If you are off-campus, it is possible you will need to connect to the VPN before this!

If these instructions are insufficient, DLINQ has set up a wonderful page here (DLINQ Zoom Help) that has video tutorials for many FAQs and much of what was covered below.

Additionally Zoom has it's own help pages set up here: Zoom Help Pages

Install Zoom

• Begin by downloading the appropriate Zoom Client for Meetings from this link: Zoom download

• Run the installer and once it is finished, if Zoom does not launch by itself, launch the application.
• You will be met with a sign-on screen. Click "Sign in", then on the right, select the option "Sign in with SSO."
• In the "Company Domain" field, simply enter "middlebury" (not "middlebury.edu").
• This should open a browser link, which will have you sign in with your Middlebury credentials. You may have to use your Multi Factor Authentication, so be prepared with your phone ready if you have that enabled.

Configuring Your Meeting Settings

• In the top right, click on your profile picture (likely just the first letter of your name on a colored backdrop unless you have changed it). Then click "Settings" from the resulting prompt.
• Under "Video Settings" if you plan to use a physical whiteboard, it may be useful to toggle the "Mirror Video" setting so text is not displayed backwards.
• Under "Audio Settings", verify the connected devices for input and output are your intended devices.
• Under "Chat Settings", it may be useful to enable the "Code Snippet" setting, allowing users to send snippets of code and preserve the code formatting. There are other settings you might change according to preference.
• If you plan to Record video, under the "Recording" tab, you can change (or find out) the file location that your recordings are sent to. Alternatively, enabling cloud recording may be preferable if you plan to share via the cloud.

Configuring Your Personal Meeting Room

This guide assumes you are only using your personal meeting room to conduct meetings.

• Go to the meetings tab of the Zoom app.
• On the right side you should see "My Personal Meeting ID", under this click the "Edit" button.
• In the resulting popup window, make sure to click and enable the dropdown menu "Advanced Settings"
• Click "Enable Waiting Room" so you can queue users and pick them out of a waiting room for one-on-one sessions.
• (If the above option is not available or doesn't work, follow instructions here
• If you would like them to be able to wait for you before you join a scheduled meeting, toggle "Enable join before host"
• If you plan to record your sessions, toggle "Automatically record meeting"

Additional Settings

For some reason, there are settings I've found only to be accessible via the zoom web portal at zoom.us. Let me know if this is incorrect. Until then, sign in at zoom.us and go to the profile settings page at this link.

Settings I believe are useful to enable are:

• Screen Sharing. If toggling this on, make sure all participants can share a screen.
• Polling, allowing you to poll the tutoring session or classroom.
• Annotation, allowing you to annotate things on a shared screen.
• Whiteboard A shared whiteboard! Great for letting students work together, or working with them on a problem.
• Remote Control, which may be useful if helping someone with a software related issue.
• Allow Removed Participants to Rejoin
• Breakout Room - Particularly useful for students with similar questions or group-activities in class.
• Remote Support
• Waiting Room - enabled here as well
• Co-Hosting - Enable this to be able to share session controls with another Tutor.

Sharing your Zoom Meeting

You can simply get your Personal Meeting ID and give it to someone with Zoom already installed via e-mail or otherwise, and have them connect at the determined time. If they have not configured zoom yet, I recommend using the "Copy Invitation" button to copy a pre-built invitation to send to them, that has all the requisite links for downloading zoom and popping them into your session.

Using Features in Zoom

These features must be enabled in the settings first, please see the above instructions!

Waiting Room

• You should be notified when someone joins the waiting room. Clicking the "Manage Participants" button or the hotkey Alt-U should allow you to see who is in the waiting room. Simply clicking admit next to their name allows you to add them to the current call.
• Similarly, once finished with someone, you can forcibly remove them by mousing over their name, clicking the "More" button, and clicking "Put In Waiting Room"
• Additional features will be added here once I've had time to use them.

Breakout Rooms

• When hosting a meeting, you should be able to click a button on the bottom menu titled "Breakout Rooms" once they have been enabled.
• When you click this, you can choose the number of rooms to create, and whether to assign participants automatically or not. We recommend assigning them manually.
• Navigating you to the next prompt gives you the screen where you can assign individual participants to different breakout rooms, and start the session.

Once students are assigned a breakout room, they will be prompted with the option to join it. They can move between breakout rooms and the main session, but not into other rooms they are not assigned to. Students can use the "Ask For Help" button once inside the room, to prompt the host (if you have left) to return and assist them.

• We recommend using these to group students together who are working on the same material or the same problem. Alternatively, you can use it as a co-host's one-on-one session.

Co-Hosting

• After enabling the feature above, you can turn another participant into a co-host.
• Simply click on their name under "Manage Participants" along the bottom of the screen, and you can select an option to make them a co-host.
• Once they are a co-host, they have access to all the same hosting settings you do.
• We recommend using this to share the session with another tutor, and let the co-host use the "Breakout Rooms" feature to conduct one-on-one sessions separately from the main host.