Can I limit who can annotate?

[rmurnane]

As a teacher, I would really love a feature where I can turn on annotating for a particular person.  The virtual whiteboard is so tempting to my young students and they want to doodle in the corners when other students are  working  translations on the whiteboard.  Does this feature already exist? I am guessing once annotating is turned on, it is available to everyone, unfortunately. 

Thanks in advance. 

[jeremyjustin]

hi @rmurnane thank you for your post here on the Zoom Community! You are correct that it is only possible to allow or disallow all participants to annotate, we don't have a way to only allow certain individuals to annotate. There is an Annotation Setting where you can "Show/Hide Names of Annotators" and if this is enabled and people see their names come up on screen, or you as the teacher see that, it helps to be able to call them out and correct the behavior. You may have seen this support article that mentions how to enable this 

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005706806

But your question is actually a great suggestion and I think it would be great if you could enter this as a feature request! Currently, our product team reviews all feature requests submitted via our feedback form https://zoom.us/feed. I highly encourage you to submit this feature and explain how it would help you in your day to day use of Zoom!

If this has answered your question to your satisfaction, please click the "Accept as Solution" button below but if not please reply and we can continue the  discussion. Thank you!

[RN]

Hey @rmurnane correct unfortunately when you disable annotation this disables all annotation for participants in the meeting. 

[kjhartma]

Possible workaround: 

In your user settings, if you only allow host/co-host to share screen, and only allow those sharing a screen to be able to annotate, doesn't that kind of then limit who can or can't annotate? 

Couldn't you then just make certain students co-hosts to allow them to annotate, and then take the co-hosting role away from them when done?

It's a lot more manual work in terms of participant and host management, but it might work.  Test it out.

[jeremyjustin]

Hi @kjhartma thank you for your suggestion, it's not a bad one for @rmurnane to try. If you go this route, we do have a support article on how to assign co-host privileges that also speaks to the capabilities co-hosts have in meetings https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/206330935-Enabling-and-Adding-a-Co-Host

Since co-hosts have elevated privileges it would make sense to remove co-host from the user as soon as they are finished with Annotation, just to help make sure they don't abuse their extra powers 🙂 

If this has answered your question to your satisfaction, please click the "Accept as Solution" button below but if not please reply and we can continue the  discussion. Thank you!