Online Meeting Tips

Here are some tips for you to get the most out of your online meeting experience!

Choose Your View

Speaker view

Speaker view will switch the large video window between who is speaking with 3 or more participants in the meeting. If it is just you and one other participant, your video will be smaller at the top and their video will appear below.

Gallery view

Gallery view lets you see thumbnail displays of participants, in a grid pattern, which expands and contracts as participants join and leave the meeting. When in Gallery view and a participant begins speaking, that active speaker is relocated to the current page you are viewing and highlighted, making it easier to recognize who is speaking.

Full-screen meeting window

You can switch any of the layouts (except floating the thumbnail window) to full screen mode by double-clicking your Zoom window. You can exit full screen by double-clicking again or using the Esc key on your keyboard. Note: In older versions of macOS, click Meeting and Enter Full-screen in the Top Menu bar.

Steps:

Click on the "view" menu (typically located at the top right of your Zoom meeting screen) to select one of the above 3 views.

Pin a Participant or a Screen

Pinning an individual participant video or screen will keep them as the largest video for your view of the meeting.  

Steps:

At the top of your meeting window, hover over the video of the participant you want to pin and click on the "..."
From the menu, click Pin. If there is an in-meeting camera device, such as the Meeting OWL, it will have its own window in the Zoom meeting, showing the people in the physical meeting location. You can use the steps above to pin this video window as well. To unpin, in the upper left corner of any currently-pinned video, click Remove Pin. This will return your view to Active Speaker layout.

Side-By-Side View When Someone is Sharing Their Screen With You

Meeting and webinar participants who are viewing a shared screen can switch to side-by-side mode, which allows you to see the shared screen alongside either the Speaker view or Gallery view, depending on which view you choose. You can also adjust the location of the separator between the shared screen and video to change the relative size of each side.

Steps:

While viewing a shared screen, click on View Options and choose Side-by-side mode. The shared screen will appear on the left and the speaker will appear on the right. Hover your pointer over the boundary between the shared screen and participants' video until your pointer changes to a double arrow and you see a grey line separating both views. Click and drag the separator to adjust the size of each view. To exit Side-by-side Mode, click View Options and then uncheck Side-by-side mode.