Opening a Zoom account

What we are going to do now is look at different ways of setting up and using video conferencing. Now, video conferencing is a very technical word for the business side, but this is also how you are chatting to your family and your friends. Now, the use of video conferencing and video meetings is massively increased since the coronavirus outbreak, where families could get together and they can talk and meet each other, still online, see them, see the kids grow and things like that, but also within business meetings. It used to be that you had to travel and see people in meetings, whereas now it is fully acceptable to be maybe working from home, dogs barking in the background and still being on a video meeting. So video meeting is here to stay both on the personal side and on the business side.

Now there are lots of different providers out there, but what we are going to do on this course, is just look at creating a Zoom and using a Zoom account. Now, with all these others, they work in very similar ways, but for the purpose of this video, we are going to concentrate on Zoom. Now, the first thing you need to do is open up a Zoom account. So we are now on the Zoom website, which is Zoom.us. And up at the top here, if you have already got an account, you can sign in, but if you want to sign up, you hit the sign-up button here and then this will take you through to the field where you need to enter in your email address. So what we are going to do here is just enter in the email... Once you have done that, we then hit the sign-up button.

Once it has done that it is going to go through and it sends an activation email, so it has sent a code through to us so that we can then confirm that the email. So now that the email has been sent... I can switch back to my Gmail account. Look at the inbox. And there it is, "Please activate your Zoom account." The reason they do this is just so that they know it is a genuine email and it is a genuine account they are setting up because there are computer bots that actually just scan on all the internet trying to open up accounts with people and this way it avoids it. So here it is, we just need to click the activate account and that will take us up to the rest of the set-up page. So what we are going to do now is just enter in our details, so we will just call this, the name, password... So well, we have noted passwords in other videos, but here we are going to use Google Chrome and their suggested password so... It has already come up with a very good scrambled password, so we are going to click that and it is entered into both boxes. That password would then be saved with Chrome.

Also, this box here is a capture box, this also proves that it is a real person, because what we need to do is put a tick in that box. When you put a tick in, some of them will just allow a tick and that is all you need to do... Others will ask you a question. So here it is saying, select all the images with taxis. So you literally just tick the box with anything with a picture of a taxi. Now, a lot of these images are American base based, hence a lot of the taxis on here are yellow. If you get it wrong, it will ask you another set of questions, so we have done that, hit verify.

And down here, I will start a question that is set as no... That is fine, just leave that one at no for now, because we are just setting up a personal account. What we then do is hit continue and up here it says the password is saved. That means that password, which is a very random number has been saved within the Google account, so we can just get really of that pop-up message and now we are all set up, ready on our Zoom account. So what we can do now, is go up to the top here and we can host meetings, join meetings and schedule meetings. So what we are going to do now is move on to looking at the basic account we have set up, so if you hit the head icon there, we can then just click on this and it will show you the basic details of the Zoom account.

The green bar at the top here is just helping us if you want to see a demo on how to use Zoom. Zoom has got loads of instructions and help videos on it should you need to it. And also down the right-hand side here, little pop-ups with help, and this icon at the bottom right is a chat system, so you can talk to them directly if you have any questions.

Now, the account we have set up is a free Zoom account. Now there are restrictions on how long you can use them, so it will not allow you to have long, long meetings. But the maximum time on them is around about the 30-minute mark and after that time your meeting will end. So that is fine, if you just want to have short meetings, if you want to have a longer meeting, you would have to end that meeting and create another one and have another link. The way to avoid that and have unlimited is to then have a paid account. So you can go on to Zoom and register for a paid account. Normally, the first level paid account is more than enough for most people, it gives you full features and you can set up meetings and have unlimited meetings and then record meetings, there are lots of other features that paid accounts will have.