Zoom Whiteboard Basics for Better Team Collaboration (Full Transcript)

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Matt Paterno. I'm a product manager for Zoom Whiteboard. Today I'm going to walk you through the basics, including how to create a board, add content, collaborate with others, and continue working after your meeting is over. Before we jump in, let's quickly look at where you can access Whiteboard. So you can open Zoom Whiteboard during a meeting, you can open it in your browser, or in the Zoom desktop app. And because Whiteboard is standalone, anything you create during a meeting will be saved to your dashboard later. So you can reopen your board from the dashboard, continue working on it, share it with others, and organize your boards so they're easy to find later. Now before we start adding content, let's quickly talk about how to navigate the canvas. So Whiteboard gives you an infinite canvas, so you can move around freely as you work. With a mouse, hold down right click, or press down the scroll wheel to drag to paint it. And then you can use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out. With a trackpad, use two fingers to pan and pinch to zoom. Now you can always use the navigation controls here to quickly fit everything back into view. Now let's start with the pen. Just like a physical whiteboard, Zoom Whiteboard is great when you want to quickly sketch something out or explain something visually. You can use the pen, the highlighter, the eraser to draw and annotate directly on the board. And if you're using a touch device like an iPad, you can naturally draw with your finger or stylus. So if I just want to quickly explain an idea, I can go ahead and sketch out right here. But what makes Zoom Whiteboard really useful is when you start bringing others into the board. So let's show you how easy it is to open in a meeting. Let's go ahead and start a meeting. And from here, click the whiteboard button. And you can choose to create a new whiteboard or select an existing board. For now, let's go ahead and create a new one. And just like that, we have shared a canvas and opened it inside the meeting. Instead of having one person do all the talking, you can have multiple people add their ideas directly onto the canvas. They can sketch something out, add their thoughts, or build on what someone else has already started. But let's say you want to prepare something ahead of time for your next meeting or workshop. So you can go ahead and create your board outside of a meeting. And this is where some of the other tools become really useful. In addition to drawing, you have tools like shapes, lines, text, and sticky notes. For example, I might add a main discussion topic here, create a few different spaces on the canvas, and give everyone an area where they can add their ideas. You don't always have to build this from scratch. You can start from one of the pre-configured templates. We have templates for things like brainstorming sessions, retrospectives, planning workshops, and educational activities. So if I'm running a brainstorming session, I can start a board that already gives everyone space to add and organize their ideas. Or if I'm teaching a class, I can create an activity where students respond to a question, add their ideas to the board, or simply work together. So now I can have my board set up and ready before the meeting even starts. For my next call, I can go ahead and open the whiteboard in the meeting again. This time, instead of creating a new board, I'll select the board that I already created. And now my workshop is ready to go. My discussion topics are already here, the spaces for people are set up, and everyone can start collaborating. And now when you're running one of these sessions, you have a few controls available to you as the host and owner of the board. If you click on the participants menu, you can see everyone who is actively on your board. And if you want to restrict editing, you can toggle this setting to disable your editing for the participants. You can also redirect everyone's attention to what you're looking at by using follow view. When I turn this on, everyone's view is centered on the same area of the board that I'm looking at, and their editing is temporarily disabled. So as a facilitator, I can guide everyone through the board and make sure we're all looking at the same thing. Now when the meeting is over, the collaboration doesn't have to end there. As I mentioned earlier, you can find a board again from your whiteboard dashboard, either in the Zoom desktop app or in your browser. The people you collaborated with during the meeting can come back and see what everyone's been working on. And if you want to bring someone else to the board, you can simply click the share button, and from there you can invite people by email or share a link with them. And you can also organize your boards in the whiteboard dashboard by putting them into folders. So it's easy to keep projects, workshops, and meeting boards together. So that's a quick look at the basics of Zoom whiteboard. The best way to get familiar with whiteboard is to really just jump in and start using it. Try sketching out an idea, bringing your board into your next meeting, or start with one of the templates to see how you can use it with your team. Thanks for watching, and I hope this helps you get started with using Zoom whiteboard.