Best Practices for Securing Your Virtual Classroom

This article is a translation from the zoom.us blog. See the original article here.

Zoom has helped schools and teachers around the world quickly transition to online teaching, and Zoom wants everyone to have a learning environment that is as effective and safe as a traditional classroom.

Zoom has built-in security features to control online classrooms, prevent disruptions, and help educators teach effectively remotely. Here are some best practices for securing your online classroom with Zoom.

Lock Your Virtual Classroom
Did you know that you can lock a Zoom Meeting session (that has already started) so that no one else can join? It's like closing the classroom door after the bell rings. Give students a few minutes to join the meeting, then click the Security icon in your Zoom window and click the Lock Meeting button.

How to Lock Your Class

Control Screen Sharing
To help instructors keep a tight rein on what’s being shown and prevent students from accidentally sharing content, Zoom has updated its screen sharing settings: screen sharing defaults to “Host Only,” so teachers are the only ones who can share content in class. (This setting may vary based on instructor needs.)

However, if students need screen sharing for discussion purposes, you can enable screen sharing in the Host Controls section. Click the arrow next to Share Screen, then click Advanced Sharing Options. Under “Who can share?” select “All participants” and close the window. You can also toggle the sharing settings under the Privacy icon in your window (while in a meeting) or change the default to All Participants in your settings (without being in a meeting).

How to manage screen sharing

Turn on the waiting room
The waiting room is one of the best ways to secure your online classroom and prevent disruptive behavior from outsiders.

When it is enabled, you have two options for who enters the Waiting Room before entering the class:

1. All Participants will send everyone to the waiting area, where you can grant access to the class individually or all at once.
2. Guest Participants Only will allow students who are logged in and have been notified of the meeting to join the class; but will send all students who are not logged in to the waiting area.

The virtual waiting room can be enabled for any class, including Schedule a Meeting. If you forget to turn it on, you can quickly turn on the Waiting Room from the Security icon. You can also send people who are in the meeting back to the Waiting Room. In the Participants panel, simply select More to the right of the student's name and select Send to Waiting Room - the student will be removed from the meeting and placed in the waiting area.

Visit Zoom's support page for more information on adjusting your Waiting Room settings.

How to turn on the Waiting Room

Locking Chat
Teachers can restrict Chat in class so that students cannot privately message other students. Zoom recommends controlling Chat access from the Security icon (rather than turning off Chat entirely in your settings) so that students can still interact with teachers when needed.

How to Control Chat Access

Removing Participants
If a non-student joins your class to cause disruption, you can easily remove them from the class by selecting the Security icon, hovering over their name in the Participants panel, and clicking “Remove” - removing them from the class and preventing them from re-entering.

How to Remove Participants

Pausing Participant Activities
If your class is disrupted, the instructor (host and co-host) can pause the meeting to remove the user and prevent further disruption. Click the Security icon and select “Suspend Participant Activities” to pause all video, audio, in-meeting chat, annotations, screen sharing, recording, and end Breakout Rooms. While the class is paused, remove the disruptive user. You can then resume the class by turning "Suspend Participant Activities" back on.

How to Pause a Meeting

Rename Participants
You can turn off student renaming in your settings. Or, if the class is in progress, you can change this setting in the meeting under the Privacy icon.

How to Restrict Renaming

All of the above features can be found under the Privacy icon in your meeting toolbar. Here's a video overview of those options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JbDfXIElT0

 

Security Options When Scheduling a Class
The cool thing about Zoom is that in addition to the security features mentioned above, there are a few options that can help you further secure your classes. These options can be found when scheduling a class.

• Passcode-protect the classroom: Create a passcode and share it with your students via your school email, so that only students in your class can access it.
• Require registration: Require students to log in to join the class. This ensures safety (avoiding malicious attendees).
• Restrict annotation: This feature prevents students from annotating on shared content. It will also display the names of individuals who wrote the annotations (if annotations are allowed).
• Use a random meeting ID: The best way to secure a class is to create a random meeting ID, which prevents the class from being shared widely. This is a better alternative to using your Personal Meeting ID, (Personal Meeting ID is not recommended as it essentially means the system understands this is an ongoing meeting and is always running).
• Allow only authenticated users to join: Selecting this checkbox means that only members who are logged into their Zoom account with an approved email address can access this class.
• Disable join before host : Students cannot join the class before the teacher joins and will see a pop-up that says “The meeting is waiting for the host to join“.

In addition, teachers have several options within the meeting to control the class:

• Disable video: Turn off student video to prevent students from being distracted or making inappropriate gestures while the class is in session.
• Mute students: Mute individual students or all students at once. Mute Upon Entry (in your settings) is also available to avoid audio disturbances at the start of the class.
• Attendee on-hold: As an alternative to muting a participant, you can instantly disable their audio/video connection. Click on the attendee's video thumbnail and select Start Attendee On-Hold to enable it.
• Hide profile pictures: In the Privacy icon, teachers can hide the profile pictures of any participants who do not have their video turned on. Only the student's name will be displayed. You can also set this option as the default in the In Meeting (Basic) section of your settings.

Important reminders for teachers

Important reminder: never share your Zoom class details (meeting ID and passcode) on any public forum, such as social media or even your school's website. People who are intent on disrupting a class will search the Internet for publicly posted meeting IDs. If you learn that a student or someone else has posted your meeting information on a platform, please change your meeting ID before your next class.

Zoom also encourages you NOT to post photos of your virtual classroom on social media or elsewhere. While it is fun to share the excitement of connecting via Zoom, Zoom is deeply committed to protecting the privacy of its K-12/elementary and secondary users and discourages publicly posting images of students, especially minors, in a Zoom virtual classroom.

ZOOM Safety
Zoom has compiled some helpful resources to help teachers and administrators—even the most technologically challenged—get up to speed on Zoom and adopt some best practices for educating via Zoom. You can also get more tips on how to secure your Zoom Meetings on the Zoom security website.

Video "How To Secure Your Zoom Meeting": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1IMmOujc9c.

And Zoom invites you to learn about the additional benefits that Zoom Education plans can provide for virtual learning and distance education.

Editor's note: This post was updated from the original March 27 version from https://blog.zoom.us/best-practices-for-securing-your-virtual-classroom/.