There are several different tools in Zoom you can use when it comes to classroom management and maintaining your virtual class's learning environment. We have other articles outlining the various icons and tools you can use in your meeting; This one focuses mainly on managing your participants and their permissions.

Since the most urgent situation is a "Zoom bomb," the first part of this article focuses on how to manage that. However, there are other tools explained afterwards that can be very useful in less drastic moments.

Zoom Intruder Incident

Preparation

These slides contain a lot of useful information (including a video demonstration) on how to prepare yourself and your students for many situations, not just a Zoom intruder. For example, it's a good idea to establish and practice a protocol for your students for instances where they or you lose power/internet, and what you want them to do in those instances. This can come in handy in a multitude of instances, not just during a Zoom intruder incident.

It's also a good idea to practice the steps below, by yourself or even with students so they know what to expect. Like a virtual fire drill. That way, you're both less likely to panic should something ever happen.

How to Deal in the Moment

1. Click the Security icon in your Zoom taskbar, then Suspend Participant Activities directly above it. This will cause every participant's video and sound to cut off, and it will uncheck every "Allow participants to" option. So no one except the hosts can interact in any way.

2. Take a deep breath. You've already stopped the situation from getting worse, and it's all uphill from here. As soon as you've collected yourself, it's a good idea to reactivate only your own video and audio so you can quickly communicate to your students what has happened, and what you're going to do next.

3. Identify and remove the intruder. To do this, find them in the Participants window, click More next to their name, and then Remove.

4. Once you are sure they have been removed, you can reactivate video and audio for your students. Debrief them if you wish, and then return to your lesson.

5. If you are sure you have all of your students in your meeting, you can choose to lock your meeting in the Security menu. Removed users are unable to return to a current meeting they've been removed, but this won't stop the intruder from coming into your meeting's waiting room under a different account/name. For peace of mind, you can lock the meeting to stop this from happening. If you make a habit of doing this even when you haven't had an intruder, just teach your students to communicate that they are trying to be let in through Canvas inbox, and keep an eye on it in case they do!

After the Fact

1. Report the incident to your Teaching & Learning Specialist as soon as possible. Please provide the link to the Canvas course and as much information as possible in your report.

2. Your TLS will work alongside the CSS and Solutions Team to pull Zoom user logs and classroom recordings, so as to notify school district stakeholders accordingly.

3. TLS, CSS, and Solutions will stay in contact to help with the next steps.

Other Meeting Controls

This section goes over how you can use Zoom Tools for classroom management.

Security Icon

If you click the Security icon, you can do the following from the top down:

Lock Meeting: As described above, this makes it so that no one new can enter the waiting area for your meeting. Only toggle this on if you have all of your students in class.
Hide Profile Pictures: This causes participants to only show their name when their camera is off. This is generally a good idea to always have toggled on, just to keep things even and on-topic.
Allow participants to:
- Share Screen: This is a good idea to keep off unless you need a specific student to share their screen.
- Chat: By default, students can only chat with meeting hosts, aka you and any co-teacher or facilitator who is a co- or alt-host. However, you can turn off the function completely here, so they can't even do that.
- Unmute Themselves: This makes it so participants cannot unmute themselves unless you ask them to. You can do that by selecting Ask to Unmute, which will pop up if you hover over their video tile or their name in the Participants window.
- Start Video: This is the same as not allowing them to unmute. Unlike that option, there is no way to ask them to start their video. You would need to uncheck this option to let any participant start their video.

Participants Icon

Mute All

Zoom gives you the option to mute every participant simultaneously. To do this, click the Participants icon, and then click Mute All at the bottom of the Participants window. It will give you the option to automatically also turn off their ability to unmute themselves (This can be changed later, as shown in the above section). Click Yes, and it will mute everyone.

Rename & Edit Profile Picture

If someone in your meeting has an appropriate or distracting name or profile picture, you can change either one by hovering over their name in the Participants window and clicking the three dots that appear.

Participant Permissions (Again)

If you click the three dots in the bottom right of the Participants window, you will get almost the exact same options as what is in the Security tab. Some additional options are the ability to ask all participants to unmute, mute them automatically upon entry, and hide profile pictures.

Sharing Screen: Disable Meeting Annotations

When you share your screen, participants have the ability to write on it. This can be great for collaboration, but if you don't want that, click More in your meeting controls, then Disable Attendee Annotation.