In-meeting Controls
In-meeting controls
The Zoom control bar allows hosts, co-hosts, and participants to make adjustments to a range of audio, visual, and feature settings.
Some controls are only available to hosts while others are available to all participants.
The Zoom control bar sits at the base of a screen by default.
The meeting host can enable and disable control bar features in the Settings section Links to an external site. of their Zoom web portal before a meeting begins. We recommend hosting several practice Zoom meetings to get familiar with each of these controls and to ensure that the features you want to use in your meetings are turned on.
Zoom meeting control bar
Depending on how the meeting host has customized their Zoom settings, the control panel should include some subset of the following features:
- Mute: Turn your microphone audio on or off.
Audio Controls (small arrow): Expand menu to test speaker and microphone and view other meeting settings. - Start Video: Start and stop the video camera.
Video Controls (small arrow): Expand menu to select a different camera, virtual background, and other camera settings. - Security (only visible to meeting host or co-host): Enable or disable security settings to manage who is admitted to the meeting and how they can participate.
- Participants:
- Manage meeting participants in this panel, including muting audio or video, sending them to a waiting room, or removing them from the meeting.
- Identify who is speaking and who is on video, indicated by the icons next to their names.
- Use other options to help manage participant audio, pictures, interaction and re-naming capability.
- Chat: Open a window for meeting participants can send a message to the whole meeting group, or individuals.
- Share Screen: Display instructions to share content from your laptop or mobile device.
- Advanced Sharing Options: Select who can share in your meeting and if you want only the host or any participant to be able to start a new share when someone is sharing.
- When sharing, you can use annotation to draw and highlight on the shared screen.
- Show Captions: Allow captions to display during a meeting. Hosts can turn on automated captioning (not 100% accurate) or designate a qualified meeting participant to type live captions.
- Breakout Rooms: Split meeting participants into a set of smaller meeting rooms for more engaging discussions.
- Reactions: Use icons to indicate status, including raising your hand, stepping away from the meeting, or broadcasting an emoji to reflect your feelings about the current topic.
- Whiteboards: Draw and annotate on a virtual whiteboard in Zoom, and/or invite your participants to contribute to the whiteboard themselves. Whiteboards are saved to your Zoom account for future use or sharing.
- Leave/End: Depart from the meeting. If you are the meeting host, you will have the option to either end the meeting completely or leave the meeting and appoint another host to continue in your place.
Video: Zoom In-Meeting Controls
This Zoom training video provides a brief overview of in-meeting controls (4:08)
Guide from Zoom: Host and co-host controls Links to an external site. in a meeting.
Check for understanding
The Zoom meeting control bar has a lot of features to manage participants and increase engagement during meetings.
Use this interactive graphic to check your understanding about Zoom features. You can enable more Zoom features ((Chat, Breakout Rooms, etc.) through the UW Zoom web portal.
Quiz yourself, then select the gold plus-sign button to check your understanding.