What you will learn
- If you wanna get the most out of your Zoom meetings, you need to know how to annotate, and use the whiteboard feature, whether you're a teacher, a trainer, or you just wanna make your presentations that much more engaging.
I'm gonna show you everything that you need to know, about annotating and using the whiteboard right here in Zoom. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
How to launch the Zoom whiteboard
And let's get started with how, we launch annotation or a whiteboard here within Zoom. So down below, we need to start by selecting Share Screen, and here you have to make a decision.
Do you want a plain canvas that's for that purpose, we would choose the whiteboard, or do you wanna share your screen and maybe share a file or a website, and start to mock up things or allow your participants to contribute as well? Let's start with the basic version first.
We're gonna click on Whiteboard and then select Share. And essentially this is going to give us a complete blank canvas.
Annotation tools and how to use them
It's pure white, we can do a number of different things here. We can use the Text feature here, and start entering things. Maybe we want people to enter in their name on the screen or tell them how they are feeling today. Something along those lines,
we can use the drawing tool here to, maybe choose a different color here, and we can start to draw silly little things,
or highlight certain things on the screen as well. I'm not gonna go into the details of every single tool here. Most of them are self-explanatory, but I imagine one of the things that's on the top of your mind is,
How to enable or disable participants from annotating
how do I enable others or prevent others from participating, from sharing on my screen? In order to do so, you need to come up to your toolbar and select Security.
And here's a section called Allow participants to. Now there's a long list of things here,
and you can see currently, anyone who has joined my meeting, can annotate on my shared screen. But if I want to prevent them, all I need to do is to click this option,
and now they don't have that option. They can not contribute to this whiteboard sharing.
But I'm gonna go back here, I'm gonna enable it, And I'm gonna just grab my phone as my fake participant here, and let's see, let me grab a different color here, and I'm just gonna do a little squiggly line so you can see, that I didn't use it with my cursor here on my main computer.
I actually used it as a participant. Now, as a host, what you can do is actually hover over, and see who has contributed to what? Now this is maybe not the best example, 'cause I'm using the same user name, on both of my devices.
But even if someone else has shared content on your whiteboard or your shared screen, you can click and drag and move things around. I find that this is most helpful when you're asking people to contribute text, maybe like a brainstorming session, and you can take their texts just like this, and drag it and group it together and put them in a different order.
This is much more effective than using the chat window, which is just linear, and if you have a number of people contributing, it might just get lost, this is a great way to group things together.
Now, note, if you do come back here to Security and say disabled shared content for others to annotate on your shared content, it will not remove what they shared already.
How to clear Zoom annotations
In order to do that, you wanna come over here to the Clear option. Now you've got three choices here. You can Clear All Drawings, meaning you're gonna return,
to a 100% clear canvas. You can say Clear My Drawings, to the things that I have contributed, or you can say Clear Viewers' Drawing. So if I choose this last option here, you can see it's gonna remove that blue squiggly line, because that was from a participant.
So you've got quite a bit of flexibility here, when it comes to controlling annotations here within Zoom. But you know what? The whiteboard is not always as useful, as you may think it is.
How to annotate a shared Zoom screen
So I'm gonna actually start a New Share. In this case I'm gonna share my screen, and I'm gonna open up a file here on my computer, because maybe you have something
That you wanna share with others, and you wanna highlight a few different things, or you want others to participate as well. I find this is often even more useful.
So here I'm gonna come up here in my toolbar, and I'm gonna select Annotate, which is gonna give me the exact same menu, the same thing that we saw on the whiteboard option. So now what I can do is I can use things like this, a Spotlight function, and I can say, well, his shirt is a different color over here. The rocket boosters or thrusters
are a little bit different than over here. The Tesla deco is different over here. I can use that same spotlight feature and use these arrows to click into certain areas. I find that that's a very helpful one as well.
Again, when you're sharing your content, you can allow others to annotate as well. So all of the same rules apply, as what we just saw on the whiteboard side of things as well.
How to undo, redo, or erase annotations
Now don't forget as you're drawing and as you're adding and contributing different things here to your screen you can always use Undo or Redo as well, right? If you wanna go back just a few different steps. The other thing that you can do, of course,
which is very crucial, is that you can come and use the Eraser function. So maybe there's just a few specific things, that you wanna get rid of,
How to save Zoom annotations
you can do so as well. Now, when everything is finished,
when you are done contributing or adding or brainstorming, maybe you'll want to actually save your annotations and everything that's been mocked up here on the screen. So your final option just to the right of Clear is Saved.
And you can choose to either save it as a PNG file, right? That's an image file, or you can choose to save it as a PDF, if you want to use it for later. So a lot of powerful things that you can do with annotation, and using a whiteboard right here within Zoom.
Now I'd love to hear from you next. If you're already using the annotation features, I'd love to know what you're using it for. And I'm sure many other viewers, would love to learn from you as well. Be sure to share your Zoom experiences, in the comments down below.
Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you give this video a like and subscribe,
right here to these Simpletivity channel. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
