- We've been doing a lot of videos
on using Zoom lately as so many of us
are gravitating towards it as a video conferencing tool
and as we're learning to be more productive
in a video conferencing and distance environment.
Today I wanna talk about using Zoom
with our mobile devices, which is really
one of my favorite ways to use Zoom.
You can host and participate in Zoom calls
using your iPhone or Android phone, or on your tablet.
I've got a tablet computer here, I've got an iPad Pro.
So I'm gonna show you how you can participate
and how you are not a second-class citizen
in any way, shape, or form if you jump on a Zoom call
in one of your mobile devices.
That's today on Dottotech.
(upbeat jazz music)
Steve Dotto here.
How the heck you doing this fine day?
And we've been getting a lot of interest
and a lot of traction on our videos on using Zoom,
which, by the way, we have several.
There's a playlist that you can click on
down in the description below, or at the end of this video
that will walk you through a variety of different tutorials
that we have on using Zoom.
But one of the ways that I really like to use Zoom
is not necessarily on your desktop
or your notebook computer,
although it's perfectly acceptable
to be using Zoom in those environments.
But I like, for a lot of us, to consider using
our mobile device, especially our smartphone,
to use Zoom, or, if you are lucky enough
to have an iPad or a good tablet,
to use that as your interface for connecting on Zoom.
And not just as a participant,
but you can actually host and control meetings
using these tools.
One of the benefits of using the mobile devices
is it frees up your computer for doing other work
if you need to be doing things
while you're kind of auditing a webinar
or an online meeting.
But the other factor is that the cameras and the microphones
that we have built into our mobile devices,
especially our smartphones, are pretty good quality,
so they often end up being better
than what we have, especially if we're using
built-in webcams and built-in microphones
in notebook computers.
Plus, it's really easy to tether in our headset
on our mobile device as well.
And you have, of course,
far more location fluidcy, fluidity?
You can move around the house.
You can be working and doing other things
while you're on a Zoom call if you're on your smartphone.
You can be even going for a walk.
You could turn off the video,
you could use your mobile connection
if you have a good data plan,
and you can participate in audio
while you're out and moving about.
All of those options are open if you use
your smartphone or your tablet as your Zoom interface.
So let's dive into it.
Let's start by looking at using our smartphone.
Okay, let me show you how to set up
a Zoom call from your smartphone,
from an iPhone in this particular case.
When you open it up, you have the choice along the top
to create a new meeting, join an existing meeting,
schedule an upcoming meeting,
so you can plan and book a meeting,
or you can also have a share screen option right here.
But if you just wanna start a meeting, just straightaway,
we're just gonna create a new meeting,
and it'll create the brand new meeting for us.
Now it can use our personal room
or we can create a brand new room which we're gonna do,
and it allows us the option to have the video on or not
as we start the conference.
Because we're on the mobile phone,
occasionally we're gonna want to do a Zoom call
perhaps just over the cellular network,
and we don't necessarily want to have the video on
because of bandwidth constraints,
so you can start just an audio conference
with the camera off.
Here as well, you can choose to dial in,
which I've never done, where you phone in
over a standard telephone line,
or you use the internet audio and video,
which is exactly the way that I want to do it right here.
So here we have my feed through
of the Zoom call that just started.
It's just me, it's a lonely Zoom call at this point.
But now we have to get participants
into the call that we've started on our phone.
And if we look along the bottom,
there's a Participants button.
We're just gonna tap on that Participants menu.
And there, if we look again
at the very bottom of the screen,
we can choose to invite people in.
We also have the option here to chat.
And when you're in a call, going into this Participants tab
will allow you to do things like mute and unmute people,
so you can control your attendees,
some of your attendees' privileges here as well.
But I'm gonna tap on the Invite button here.
And here's a place that I have had
fails myself in using Zoom.
For some reason, when I've just sent an email
to somebody using this, it is often
the people don't seem to get the email.
There seems to be some issue with it.
Or using the Invite Contacts, some of the automated systems.
So I just go old school.
I copy the URL of the Zoom meeting,
and then I go into email or into messaging
or whatever connection you can
reach out to your people with,
and I'm just gonna send this to myself
as a quick email right now.
I've sent that, so now I'm going to
go into my email on my computer.
I'm gonna open that link, and we will be able to see
the call that we originated here on our smartphone
on both the computer and on the phone
at the exact same time.
So this should be super exciting.
Let me go back to Zoom here.
And there it is.
There's the Zoom link.
I am going to launch.
I'm gonna first of all turn down the speaker here.
'Cause I know we're gonna get some echo.
And I'm also gonna mute speaker on my monitor,
or my computer here.
'Cause we would get that terrible
feedback loop if we didn't.
All right, do I want to open the Zoom meeting?
I do indeed.
And so now we should be jumping into a meeting.
Ah, there we go.
Where I've got me on the computer,
and I've got me, let's turn that down, on the phone as well.
So there we have it.
And the microphone isn't completely muted,
so let me mute myself here.
So there, now it won't come through.
That's good.
And do you see how it muted actually on my smartphone
at the same time as I muted it here?
Watch, I will unmute.
Mute.
Ah, so we see we have that.
So if I close down the participant screen now,
now I can see what it looks like here from the smartphone.
And if I am in portrait mode like this,
it appears in portrait mode on the computer.
If I turn to landscape, it widens out a bit,
and we see the feed there.
And I see this, we see the second feed now,
it actually changed the angle a little bit
so it looks a little bit different.
But you see the second angle here,
where you can see my computer feed
or the guest's feed in the screen.
Now, of course, screen real estate is very dear
on the smartphone, so managing things like
the different assets that we have within the call
are a little bit different on the smartphone.
Obviously on the computer, it's so easy for me
to open a chat window into chat away
just using the keyboard.
But in the, as far as we're concerned
when we're on the smartphone,
if we wanna go into Participants,
and there, if I tap on Chat, up comes the chat window.
But you'll see you lose the entire main window
at that point there.
And so you can enter, and you can enter the information
into the chat here, and of course it appears
in the chat overall.
So you have the same permissions,
it's just you're far more limited
as far as what you can see at the screen at the same time.
In the participant screen here,
if you're using a call, this is where you can
turn on and off permissions for people.
And also, very important here, is you can mute everybody,
or you can unmute everybody,
which will allow you to control all of the audio in a call
so that you're not getting a lot of cross talk
and those sorts of things happening there as well.
So that gives you some nice, basic permissions right here.
But is there more?
Why yes, there is.
For example, if we go into the Sharing Content screen,
it's a little bit different than we have on our desktop,
but here you can share images from your photo library.
You can share content from your iCloud drive or Dropbox,
so you can share a slideshow or other content
that you have stored somewhere else in the cloud
using these features here.
And as well, you could share a website.
You could actually go to a website
and share that information there as well.
So you've got some of the same features.
Under the More menu, what do we have here?
We have the ability, oh, this'll allow us
to jump into the meetings itself
and into the meeting settings,
so you can adjust the meeting settings.
They allow the virtual background here.
Now, we've shown you the virtual background
in another video on our,
I've shown that to you on our, using it on the computer.
I wonder how it looks here.
Pretty much the same kind of things.
It's gonna try and work.
There it is.
The same kind of idea.
I don't see that it has the the option
to use a green screen, but you can indeed
use a virtual background if you choose.
Now, this works, I think, really well
as a participant, using the smartphone as a participant.
A little bit cumbersome, hosting a meeting,
not quite as good if you're hosting a meeting.
But still, pretty serviceable.
And of course, using the microphone
and using the camera on your smartphone
does a really good job of delivering,
oh, I gotta turn off that virtual background.
I hate those virtual backgrounds by and large.
None, that would be the choice, there we go.
But you know, the quality is really good.
And certainly if you plug in a headset,
you can even improve the audio quality here.
And you can set up, you know,
set it up on a tripod so that you can
work away on your computer if you happen to have a computer
that you wanna be working on,
or you could also have this completely set up
as your only interface if you're in a place
where you don't have access to a computer,
it still allows you to participate
as a participant in Zoom calls or, in this case here,
as even the host of a Zoom meeting.
All on your smartphone, pretty cool.
Okay, now what I'm gonna do is we are going to bring
another mobile player into the game.
And let me show you here.
I'm gonna take the feed here and turn around.
So you can see, I'm gonna flip the camera around
so you can see that I've got here...
Come on, flip the camera.
There it is.
This is the 11-inch iPad Pro,
and as you can see, we've got Zoom running on it as well.
And it, the iOS version is pretty much identical
in both the iPad and on the smartphone, on the iPhone.
Just, you have the advantage of some extra real estate
when you're on the iPad.
But it's the same kind of functionality.
So let's just take a quick look at it, shall we?
If we go in and we take a look through the main menu,
of course we can join an existing meeting,
start our own meeting, or let's even just show you
just so you know, you can schedule a meeting as well here.
If we go into the schedule, you can create a schedule,
invite people into it, and actually plan and do
the kind of the organizational structure that you need.
And that is of course available
on the smartphone as well as on the desktop version.
So you have the ability to schedule the meetings as well.
You also have here the ability to screen share,
which I will show you in just a moment.
I'll show you, now on the iPad I think
it gets way more exciting than on the iPhone.
I'll show you why in just a moment.
But first, let's go and let's actually
join the existing meeting that we have going.
So I'm gonna go into that same email.
I'm gonna launch it.
And so now, this same meeting that we were just in,
that's all been started a few moments ago on our iPhone.
We are participating in with all of our different devices.
So let me just mute this.
There we go, so that now is muted.
So here we've got, we can see that we've got
the ability to, instead of having all of the menu items
along the bottom, the menu items along the top,
and we have to kind of tap on the screen
in order to access them.
But what I wanted to show you was
the whiteboard option on the iPad.
'Cause this is where it sets itself apart.
The chat is the same, sharing files is the same,
all of those things.
But the whiteboard on the iPad is a bit of magic,
because I've got the newer iPad using Apple's pencil,
and I can illustrate really nicely using this.
So I can just put it, I can lay it flat down,
and you can make notes.
If you're a math teacher, you can be doing equations.
You can have all of that ability
to be able to create that kind of content.
You can copy and paste, of course.
You can type onto the whiteboard.
But using the stylus, especially for instruction,
for teachers on the iPad,
I think that's one of the real magic pieces
of using the iPad in this environment.
So there you've got it, though.
Regardless of which platform you want to participate
in the Zoom call on your smartphone,
on your computer, or on your tablet,
which adds some extra magic,
you can be an equal participant
in a Zoom conference call in any
and all of these environments.
As I promised off the top of this video,
if you decide to participate in video conferencing
using Zoom on your smartphone or your mobile device,
you are not a second-class participant at all.
You can participate fully in the entire experience
and contribute to your community.
Now, before we leave, I'm gonna ask you
a couple of different favors.
The first favor I'm gonna ask is
if you've enjoyed this video,
if you found it useful, please leave us a...
Riley, go sit down.
I'm trying to wrap up my video here.
Can you let me do this?
I'm gonna try it again.
You wait, and I'll talk, okay?
Just hold two secs.
I hope you found today's video to be useful,
and if you have, I have a few favors to ask of you.
The first favor is, if you could,
I would appreciate you giving us a thumbs up
and liking this video and sharing it with others
if you think it will be valuable to them.
Secondly, if you've not yet subscribed to this channel,
make sure that you subscribe
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And if you have any comments or suggestions,
put them in the comments below.
I read them all, and I respond
to just as many as I possibly can.
Til next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.