Pro Tip #5: Engaging your Audience by having them Annotate your Zoom Presentation

[Steph]

We all live in an era where we may need to present to an audience to educate them on a topic, raise awareness, and/or incorporate a fun activity over work. To make your Zoom Meetings more interesting, this month’s ProTip is all about how to incorporate our annotation feature to allow meeting participants to mark-up your activity slide or write their general creative thoughts.

How to annotate on shared content

1. Start sharing your screen.
2. Tap the  Annotate on your screen. This will open the annotation tools.
3. You should see something like this and have an array of feature options to annotate (e.g., draw and stamp).
   
4. Have fun and annotate your page.
   
   
5. Tap the  Annotate button again to close the annotation tools once finished. 

This is a great tool for icebreakers (e.g., favorite food and/or place), emphasizing certain pieces of information, and online board games, such as Jeopardy. As a result, the meeting host may ask their participants to notate their designated presentation slide(s). Once their activity is done, they can clear their slide and move forward with the rest of their deck. For more information, please see our Zoom Support article here.

Please share with us situations where you have incorporated annotation tools into your Zoom Meetings in the comments below!

[Bri]

This is super helpful information! Thanks for sharing @Steph 🏆🔥

[YaBoiB]

@Steph  you are a rockstar!!!!

[cburgess]

If I'm viewing someone else's shared screen and I click on Annotate in my View Options, should I have all the annotation tools, or do I only get to use the pen? Right now I when I do that I don't have any tools, and just the pen as the default. 

[YaBoiB]

Hello @cburgess, 

 This could likely mean that the host of the meeting that you were a participant in may have disabled the annotations for that meeting. Please see this reference article https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005706806-Using-annotation-tools-for-collaboration. 

The best test would be if you can start a new meeting from your own client and see if you can use the annotation tools while sharing your screen or a whiteboard. Then if you are in need of the other options for annotation tools in a meeting where you are not the host, you can ask the host to enable the tools for you. 

The support article (above) lays out how all of this is possible. I would also suggest that you check the version of Zoom that you are running and make sure that you are on the latest stable version. 

Please let me know if that is helpful for you. 

Regards,

Brandon