The Verge: When you’re in the middle of a Zoom video meeting at home and your cat suddenly decides to start bawling for its dinner, you’ll want to mute your audio in a hurry. In that case, you have a choice: you can either reach for your mouse or touchpad and start searching for the “Mute” button or you can use a quick keyboard shortcut to cut off that noise immediately.
11 comments:
This was a very short but nonetheless helpful article. I think we all will find ourselves becoming very quickly acquainted with Zoom and all it has to offer, and it's really such a mind-boggling concept to me. It feels like I'm living in a dream. This is about to get kind of philosophical, I guess, but this is by far the weirdest time of my life, and I don't think I will ever forget about it. What makes it even more crazy is that I know this will be history one day, and we'll be able to recount my experiences to the generations after us, especially if we all get those adorable "Zoom University" t-shirts.
Anyway, back to the article, I've become decently acquainted with Zoom at this point, but I do find myself discovering different settings every once and awhile. I think as creatives, and as a generation particularly knowledgable with technology, we are curious enough to explore and have fun with these features. I mean, what else are we gonna do? Pay attention to the lecture?
This is totally cool. Speaking on Zoom during a class is really not my favorite, especially when I'm scrambling to press the right keys while making sure I'm on mute and my camera angle is okay. There is definitely an added stress with online class that affects me. Relying on this technology is a challenge because we cannot always control the strength of our connection or of others. ost professors have been great about recording their classes, but I'd rather stay in tune with it live in case I have questions. Once I read about these keyboard shortcuts I started messing around with them and discovered that you can customize your keys for certain ones. It may seem kind of silly that I'm getting excited over this, but I'm trying to find the positives in everything. Plus I'm on Zoom basically all day, so anything that improves its functionality is great to know about.
This is definitely not an article I thought I would ever need to read, however, here I am, enjoying it. Today, all of my classes are turning to Zoom in order to facilitate an environment that is as close to a classroom as you could expect as everyone is working from home. That being said, this article truly has given me a lot of useful shortcuts to keep in mind while working with zoom. While most of what I am using Zoom for right now involves joining the meeting and then just sitting there listening, some of these shortcuts will be put to use for sure. The Zoom platform truly is extremely robust and the fact that there are all of these shortcuts just helps prove it. From allowing people to use effects like a green screen effect to handling meetings of 150 plus people, Zoom was clearly made to work for exactly this. Without Zoom, I don't know where we would be at this time.
As we have transitioned from in person classes to all online via Zoom, this has been a major time of learning for everyone. To me, someone who’s grown up surrounded by technology, opening a software that is very user friendly is not hard to learn all the functions. Of course some features take time to learn such as how to make polls for the participants to answer, but some features such as on and off mic and camera are straight forward. This morning I actually got to be on a call with my parents and some of our friends who I grew up with but have sadly missed for the past couple years due to new jobs pulling me away. On this call I got to watch how not only my parents, who are tech savvy people, but also some very technology inept people learn how to use zoom. Some of them have been using zoom for the past two weeks for their jobs and meetings, others used their children’s tablets because they had it for class already. Some were confused how to turn their camera or mic on or off. I think as more and more people start to use this software, it will be easier for everyone, but with the list of easy commands I can get one step closer to fully knowing how to use this software.
I feel like I'm slowly leaning into the Zoom game and now have a laundry list of things I want to buy to make my learning experience better. I would love a dedicated button on my keyboard to mute and unmute my mic so I'm not scrambling to figure that out during class to answer a question, but knowing the keyboard shortcuts does help. In fact, I currently have a button on my mouse set up to act as the spacebar for temporary mute/unmute. The biggest downside I have discovered, however, is since I use my laptop to take notes, these shortcuts become meaningless once I switch off the zoom application. Even though it is still up, now I effectively lose control over it. Sure, I can Alt+Tab my way back but it just doesn't quite work as seamlessly as I would like. Nevertheless, I am learning more functions that I didn't know existed every time I open zoom, and this article helps even more. Hopefully this will make everything a little easier over the next few weeks.
Much like DJ said, I never thought I would find myself reading an article like this. However, with the current social distancing lifestyle, we are being told to live, virtual instruction has really taken off. Personally, I take all of my courses on Zoom now and I have actually been fairly surprised with the capabilities of the software. I think the best function Zoom has is the screen shareability. Without such a function, instructors' presentations would be much harder to follow along with. As for the keyboard shortcuts, I haven’t found myself needing them yet. I love the spacebar to temporarily unmute function whenever I contribute in class. Another feature of Zoom that I appreciate is the annotation tool when screen sharing. Giving the instruction to physically point out important information really helps whenever we are discussing diagrams or images. While I appreciate that Zoom has keyboard shortcut options, I do not personally use many of them.
Yeah this was pretty helpful, and I definitely will be using most of these commands in the future. I've found that keyboard commands are one of the most necessary things in my life right now because I have to be on the computer all day since this whole zoom online school started. I actually really like zoom though, i think that it is doing it's job really well, and it makes a lot of thee classes easier than they would be if we were expected to do everything without and face to face contact with our classmates and professors. I have enjoyed using zoom for many meetings and classes, and think it is an interesting idea to use zoom even when we are done with online school to facilitate meetings remotely, so that it isn't a huge effort of meeting up in person if people are in different cities. This whole situation really is making me think how much technology affects the world, and what we can do with it to make our lives earlier!
After a week and a half of using zoom every day for classes, I think a lot of these keyboard shortcuts were ones that I figured out on my own or through digging around more. With that being said, I still feel like there is a lot of functionality for zoom that I am still working towards figuring out (one of which is how to make a meeting last for longer than 40 minutes, because as of right now I have yet to master that). Post- COVID19, I think there is going to be a desire for our workforce to have more skill and understanding of technology, since it is such a crucial part of how we are staying connected and integrated into our work currently. It will be interesting to see how platforms like zoom will have shaped our environment when we get back to normal- whatever that may look like after this is all.
If I am being honest, I thought that Zoom would be a disaster of an experience. I mainly based this assumption on the concept of nearly EVERY student at EVERY American university logging onto just ONE website for video streaming all at the same time every day. In truth, I was not even sure my internet at home would hold up with five or six people using it all day. I have been pleasantly surprised with how well Zoom works, especially compared to other video chatting platforms like Messenger and Skype. The audio is considerably better, it does not kill my laptop battery, my laptop is not processing in overdrive, and it has been very smooth functionally as well. Having these little shortcuts around will for sure help in the coming weeks as we get more used to staring at our screens. Especially the ones that aid microphone audio! Too many un-muted mics.
Very short and sweet article but nevertheless still very informative. The keyboard shortcuts could be pretty helpful to me during my classes for when I need to run out of the room or (sort of like the example) my cat is causing problems. Zoom also has a lot of capabilities that make it a pretty good tool to help with the remote learning. However Zoom is something I never really imagined I’d need to use day to day, and I’d never even heard of it before this whole situation broke out. While it does have many features that help make learning more streamlined and easier, it’s pretty awful compared to actually being in class. For one class, it’s nice not needing to be there and getting to have it recorded to watch again later if you got lost during the lecture, but for everything else it’s not. And trying to keep the same school schedule but all online classes plus online assignments is a lot of time just sitting staring at the computer which really isn’t good for you or enjoyable.
I think this article was short but helpful, especially for the thousands of us who have never used Zoom before and now find our entire lives to be based around it. I think my favorite shortcut from the list is the ‘hold spacebar to quickly unmute’, for quick comments in a class, it’s often much faster and easier than trying to mouse over to the unmute button, especially in classes with multiple windows open. I do think it’s annoying when you try to do a keyboard shortcut but can’t because you were still clicked into another window to take notes or work along in excel, but that’s more user error than lack of functionality on Zoom’s part. I think it’s interesting that if and when we go back to ‘normal’, basically everyone is going to be very used to using Zoom as a program, and I’m interested to see if it becomes more prevalent in our jobs and home life as a result.
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