Zoom is one of the most popular video meeting apps right now. People are zooming left and right, whether it’s for work from home meetings, online classes or just to connect with friends and family. The video conferencing service is dominating the market now and one of the reasons is the abundance of wonderful and innovative features it offers.
One such feature is the collaborative in-house whiteboard the app offers. Zoom whiteboard is loaded with great features unlike any other and is extremely user-friendly. We’re really not exaggerating the tales of its great features or its easy usability. The Zoom whiteboard offers a gamut of tools to the user, and you can even save the contents of the whiteboard.
How to Use Whiteboard in a Zoom Meeting
To use the Whiteboard in a Zoom meeting, click on the ‘Share screen’ option on the call toolbar.
One of the options in the available screens to share will be ‘Whiteboard’. Select it, and click on ‘Share’.
The whiteboard will open instantly and everyone in the meeting will be able to see it on their screens. You can also see the meeting participants in a minimized window while using the whiteboard. You can move the minimized meeting window anywhere on the screen. Click on ‘Stop Share’ to end the whiteboard sharing.
And it is also quite easy to collaborate on the whiteboard in the meeting, even though it is technically a screen sharing session. By default, other participants in the meeting can use the whiteboard without any additional steps. It comes very handy when you want to collaborate with participants in the meeting for an interactive session.
How to Enable Names of Annotators on the Zoom Whiteboard
One of the most innovative features Zoom whiteboard offers is that you can even see the name of the participant next to what they wrote or drew on the whiteboard. To enable this feature, go to the top edge of your desktop screen. The meeting toolbar will appear on the screen. Click on the ‘More’ option.
From the menu that appears, select the ‘Show names of annotators’ option.
As long as this option is enabled, every doodle on the whiteboard will show the name of the participant who contributed it. The names disappear after an initial couple of seconds. You can disable it the same way at any time during the meeting.
How to Disable Participants from Using Whiteboard
The Zoom whiteboard is collaborative by default each time you use it in a new meeting. But what if you didn’t want other participants in the meeting to be able to use the whiteboard while you were using it. Well, that’s easy too. You can easily disable other participants from accessing the whiteboard to prevent any disruptions. They will not be active participants, just passive viewers.
Go to the top edge of the screen to bring up the call toolbar, and click on the ‘More’ option. Then, select ‘Disable participants annotation’ from the available options.
Other participants will no longer be able to annotate anything on the whiteboard, neither will they be able to request to annotate. Only you can enable participant annotations again. It can be enabled the same way it was disabled.
Zoom Whiteboard is one of the best whiteboards a video meeting app offers. In addition to the traditional tools that a whiteboard offers, it is also collaborative. Not only can users collaborate on it seamlessly, but it also offers the feature to show the names of the person next to each annotation so there is no room for confusion in a collaborative session while using the Whiteboard.
If needed, the presenter can also disable other participants from using the whiteboard. Currently, the collaborative abilities on the Zoom whiteboard are either all in or all out. There is no in-between, i.e. you cannot give the whiteboard access to only selective users in the meeting. Hopefully, the feature might come along in the future, but until then we’ve got to say it still offers a lot of good features.
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