Zoom Meetings – Polling, Non-Verbal Responses and Breakout Rooms

- As Zoom becomes more and more important for so many of us for our business meetings and our communications with others, I'm gonna share with you three advanced meeting techniques. Now, if you're using these already, they might not seem advanced, but I find that we get a lot of questions about all three of these features in our comments, so I'm gonna share with you how to create and manage polls in Zoom, I'm gonna show you how to use nonverbal communication, which isn't just looking at your spouse like this. There are actual nonverbal communication tools built into Zoom that will allow your meeting members and attendees to give you feedback non verbally. And we're also gonna take a look at breakout rooms, which really opens some wild doors as far as adding additional functionality to Zoom for meetings and also for entertainment, it turns out. So we're gonna be taking a look at three ways to significantly up your meeting game today on DottoTech. Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing this fine day? And as promised, today we're gonna take a look at three features that are built in to Zoom that will allow you to increase the engagement level of your meetings. Increase the quality, dare I say, increase the entertainment value of the meetings which you are hosting. And they're all built into Zoom, both the free and the paid version. Now before I jump into it, I'm going to show you one more time, a lot of people still get a little bit confused as to how they find the different features that we're show casing. And if we take a look here, I've got a Zoom meeting room open already. All of the features that we are gonna be talking about today they appear down here in this bottom menu bar. But if you don't see them in your version of Zoom when you open Zoom, if you don't see those options here, here's what I want you to do. Go into your account, into your Zoom account, and there you go into your settings. If you go into your settings area and you scroll down, you can look for all of the different features that we're showing, in fact, any of the features that we've been showing in any of our videos up to now, and you just have to make sure that the toggle is on for the feature that we are talking about because there are many many features built into Zoom that they don't set up by default to have turned on and you have to go in and you have to enable them. So that's where you go to look if you can't find any of the features that we're showing today. Now in this room here that I already have open, I'm gonna be showing you how we manage polling, how we do nonverbal responses, which I think is vastly under utilized and incredibly valuable. And then I'm gonna show you a little bit about breakout rooms. Breakout rooms are not something that I've use much, but oh my gosh, I think they're a really valuable asset for all sorts of different types of meetings. But let's start with the polling feature. Now there's two ways that you can set up polling within Zoom. If you're in the middle of a meeting and you want to poll people, you just wanna decide, hey I wanna create a poll right here in the middle of the meeting while we're going on, you can just click on the polling button and there you can create and launch a brand new poll. You can create it from scratch. You can just go in and when you do that, you can add a poll, you enter the title for the poll, you put in your question, put in the answers, and then you can post the poll and you can save it and you can share it with the group that you're sharing with. If you're a little bit more organized, you can set up the poll in advance and how you do that and I do find, the first time I did it actually I did find it a little bit confusing and I think a lot of you are going to have the same confusion. If you schedule a new meeting, when you're setting up a new meeting in Zoom, they tell you that the polling feature's right down at the bottom of this registration window when you're setting up all of the assets. But if you take a look at this one, it's not there, there's no place to set up the poll when I scroll down to the bottom. But if I save the meeting, and I'm just gonna save this one the way it is, if I save the meeting, as soon as the meeting has been saved, which means that you've got it scheduled. Then, when you go down to the bottom of the screen, the polling feature appears and you can add by clicking on add, you get to the same dialogue box that we were just looking at that will allow you to add a poll at this point. So that's how you can add a poll on the fly or you can add a poll in advance before the meeting starts. Now for the rest of the features they're both ones that happen within the meeting and to see how we actually enact the poll, what I did was I reached out on Facebook a few minutes ago and I said to my friends on Facebook, "who wants to jump in a meeting "so we can do a quick demo of some of these features?" So let's go to a real live meeting and see polling, see nonverbal responses, and see breakout rooms in action. So as you can see, I have now three people in the waiting room, waiting to come in to this meeting. So I can go and I can see the waiting room here, I can see all of the people I have, I can admit them one at a time or I can admit everybody at once. So I am going to do that right now, I'm going to admit all into the meeting and it takes a second for their systems to kick over and for them to join us. But I thank everybody for the weird call that I put out saying please join me for a quick little meeting so that I can test out some features, so welcome one and all. How you guys all doing?

- Fantastic, how are you?

- I'm doing great. Now it looks like I have, did I set it up, I think I set it up to have all of your webcams not enabled as you come in. So if you wanna enable your webcam you can, if you're having a hair day like I've been having through this whole thing, you don't have to necessarily do it. But thank you for that. Now I'm just doing a demo, so I'm showing a couple of features here, I'm gonna switch to gallery view so we can see everybody in the gallery. So the features that I wanted to showcase today was some of the nonverbal responses that are happening within Zoom and I also wanna show the polling feature, which a lot of people are not using. So I'm gonna begin with I'm gonna ask you guys a poll. We've got three of you here so it's enough people that we can at least have a majority one way or the other. So all you do to add polls is you can by clicking on the polling icon or the polling button, you can load the poll, now I pre-populated this poll, but you can also create a brand new poll on the fly if you choose. But I pre-created this one, is that a word? Pre-created? And I'm gonna say launch the poll. Now you should all now see on your computers the question right? Do you see it all?

- That's a good misspelling right there.

- Oh did I? Oh yeah, do you like poos? That's typical of Steve as I'm rushing my way through putting together the demo. so I'm pretty sure nobody likes poos in meetings, but it was supposed to be poll. So there we go. So we see the responses coming in as everybody is able to do them all. And then you can end the poll and I think it will share the results with everybody, but thank you for that. Have everybody voted? Come on come on, who hasn't voted? Who hasn't voted? Yvonne, have you not voted? I drafted Yvonne at the last moment, but we're gonna end the poll now and we see the results. So you can relaunch the poll if you want, oh I can share the results, in which case now, that's where it is, so you can share the results once you're done. Now, one other cool aspect which I think a lot of people miss because you have to enable this in the preferences before you, stop sharing that now, it'll be turned off, there we go. You have to enable this in the preferences before you launch a meeting is if you open your side panel, so if you click on the participants in the bottom so that you have the side panel coming out of the side, there's all these nonverbal responses that are available to you. Now most people are aware of the reactions which are in the bottom of the window, you can see there where you can give a thumbs up or applause, which is nice, and I saw Heather gave me a nice little I think a thumbs up a moment ago. But you can also give these nonverbal cues down in the bottom, which, so if I say, do you guys like the idea of me doing more of the, calling more of the Facebook friends on for meetings, you can click on yes, no, you can also ask me to go faster or slower. Now those responses don't appear here in the video window, but instead I see your nonverbal responses happening in the participants screen. So the presenter can have feedback from its community. So you know how so often when you're doing a webinar or something like that, people all right saying, give me a thumbs up if you like this idea or if you want me to do the other thing? And so quite often you have to do that in chat. It's almost impossible for a presenter of any meeting to stay ahead of the responses in chat as people are commenting. But using these tools you can do it. And you can also nudge people, do you see there? You can actually, somebody click on asking me to go faster, Yvonne, click on asking me to go faster, can you see the nonverbal, there is it, Heather, good stuff, you guys got it going, there it is. So that is how it all comes together as far as our different more advanced meeting techniques. I think most people slide by. We get so caught up on just what's happening on screen in a meeting that we have these other tools that are available to us to add value, to add layers of information density to a meeting. The other, of course, big thing is as you're recording any meeting, you can adjust the speaker view and that will adjust who is seen in the video as you're recording the video. So I always like to go to the gallery view which gives you an overall view of everybody within the meeting, that's one way. And the other thing, I'm gonna try this, there's not enough of us, I will, I'll try to do it into two, I'm sure I have enough people. But the breakout rooms are another vastly under utilized feature. So I'm gonna assign three participants to two rooms okay one of you is gonna be in a room all by yourself. Now you can do it manually where you choose which individuals go into which room, so you can break up people you know are problematic. I think for teachers, the ability to break up rooms and to break up troublemakers from the rooms would be a great thing to do. But I'm gonna automatically break you guys into breakout rooms, then I'm gonna try and bring you back. I've actually never done this, so here we go, you ready? Creating breakout rooms. Yvonne, you're all by yourself, I'm gonna open all the rooms, boom. Now the participants have been invited to join breakout rooms, so they're actually being invited to go and there's a little moving icon here, so now they've all moved out into their breakout rooms. So the host still has control to bring people back. Now I can actually join, I can actually move into those rooms myself. I believe I just click on join. Yes I'm gonna join breakout room number one.

- Absolutely that would work.

- Oh, see I joined you guys in your room.

- Hey Steve.

- Isn't that nice? I'm gonna leave the room and see what happens, then I'll bring you back. Thank you by the way very much for doing this, this is awesome, awesome community spirit.

- Oh love it.

- Okay, I'm going to leave the breakout room. She's asking for help. Okay, so Yvonne, you actually asked for help in your meeting and so you requested help, so that's cool, so I got that message.

- That's one feature, you got the ask for help on the bottom and you can invite the host.

- There we go, good stuff, thank you for sharing that. Okay, I'm gonna go back and bring everybody back together. And I'm gonna click back on breakout rooms and I'm gonna close all the rooms. There it is. Give them a couple seconds to leave their breakout rooms and I think they should all come back here, yes? And everybody's reentering our room. There it is. That works pretty slick, that works way slicker than I thought it would, doesn't it?

- We've used that for online Cards Against Humanity where we had like, I don't even know how many people.

- So you played online Cards Against Humanity? Oh that's fun. I wanna be invited into the next meeting, okay Yvonne?

- Yeah, we did it with, for murder mysteries.

- Okay. You guys should be doing the videos for YouTube. That's awesome. Well listen, I gotta thank everybody, I'm gonna get on with recording this, but I gotta thank everybody so much for helping me out here. My thanks to my guests who helped me out with that particular meeting, that was fun and they were all good spirits, so I thank you once again for helping everybody understand. Some pretty cool features. I think you will agree. Polling, obviously, its value is self-evident. Those nonverbal responses though, I think if you can train your users, especially when you have regular meetings, if you can train people to use those nonverbal responses, you can really add to the value of your meetings. And breakout rooms, well, as was mentioned within the demo, there's a lot of ways people are using them. Not just for productivity, not just efficiency within a meeting, but people are using them as part of the game culture that is starting to grow out of us not being able to physically get together, but wanting to visit with our friends and have fun using these meeting tools and still maintain physical distance. So some exciting options there, I'm looking forward to trying those out a little bit more myself. Now I hope you found the rest of the video today to be useful. Please, any comments, suggestions are appreciated, I do take time to read each and every comment that you post here in the comments area, but I don't necessarily have time to answer each and every question, so I apologize for that. If you've not yet subscribed to this channel, what the heck are you waiting for? Subscribe, ring that notification bell, and while you're at it, giving us a nice thumbs up and a like is always appreciated as well. Til next time, I'm Steve Dotto, have fun storming the castle.