Best Practices for Securing Your Virtual Classroom

Edmingle-zoom has helped many Institutes and teachers around the world quickly shift to remote virtual learning, and we want all of them to have the same productive environment as their traditional classroom settings.

Edmingle-zoom comes pre-stocked with numerous security features designed to control online classrooms, prevent disruption, and help educators effectively teach remotely. Here are some best practices for securing your virtual classroom using Edmingle Zoom.
Please find the list of topics covered below:

  • Enable the Waiting Room
    1. For Individual Class
        - Via Adding Extra Class.
        - Edit Scheduled Class.
    2. At Batch Scheduling Level

  • Lock your Virtual Classroom

  • Control Screen Sharing

  • Lock-down the Chat

  • Remove Participant From Running Class

1.Enable the Waiting Room

The Waiting Room feature is one of the best ways to protect your Zoom virtual classroom and keep out those who aren’t supposed to be there.

The Virtual Waiting Room can be enabled for every class (in your settings) or for individual classes at the scheduling level.

  1. For Individual Class: At the individual class level, this can be done in two ways:

I) When Adding an Extra Class: While adding an extra class, you will get an option to enable the waiting room by selecting the “Is approval required to join the class”.


II) Edit Scheduled Class: Admin can also enable the waiting room of any scheduled class directly on the Admin Dashboard under Today’s Classes before sign-in Virtual Class click over drop-down (Right to a Sign-in button) and select Edit/Reschedule class, once you select, a window will pop-up, select “Is approval required to join the class” and save.


  1. At Scheduling Level: At the scheduling level, you need to select “Approval Required to Join?”, this will enable a waiting room for the classes scheduled.



If the "Is approval required to join the class" setting is kept on before you launch the class, the meeting will have a waiting room feature enabled by default.


Waiting Rooms during a meeting


You also can use the Waiting Room feature during a meeting, which allows the host to put participants into a Waiting Room on the fly. This is a great feature because you can control when people join your meeting. To enable this, you need to click over “Security” and select “Enable Waiting Room”.



And, you can also put an individual participant into the waiting room by click over Manage Participants and click over More above participants' name and select Put in the waiting room.





2.Lock your virtual classroom

Did you know you can lock an Edmingle-Zoom session that’s already started so that no one else can join? It’s kind of like closing the classroom door after the bell. Give students a few minutes to file in and then click “Security”  at the bottom of your Zoom window. In the Security pop-up, click the button that says Lock Meeting


3.Control screen sharing

To give instructors more control over what students are seeing and prevent them from sharing random content, Zoom recently updated the default screen-sharing settings for our education users. Sharing privileges are now set to “Host-Only,” so teachers by default are the only ones who can share content in class.

However, if students need to share their work with the group, you can allow screen sharing in the host controls. Click the arrow next to Share Screen and then Advanced Sharing Options. Under “Who can share?” choose “Only Host” and close the window. You can also change the default sharing option to All Participants in your Zoom settings.

Changing sharing settings in a meeting

  1. Click the arrow next to Share Screen.
     

  2. Click Advanced Sharing Options.

  3. Click the radio button for All Participants.

Note: If the option is grayed out, it has been locked at either the group or account level. You need to contact your Zoom admin.

4.Lockdown the chat

Teachers can restrict the in-class chat so students cannot privately message other students. We’d recommend controlling chat access in your in-meeting toolbar controls (rather than disabling it altogether) so students can still interact with the teacher as needed.

Controlling Chat Access

Meeting hosts can control whether participants can chat with everyone or only with the host. 

  1. Start a meeting or webinar as a host. 

  2. Click Chat in the Meeting Controls.
     

  3. At the bottom of the in-meeting Zoom Group Chat window, click More, and then choose an option for Allow attendees to chat with.

    • For meetings, the host can allow attendees to chat with everyone or with the host only. 

5. Remove a participant from running class

If someone who’s not meant to be there somehow manages to join your virtual classroom, you can easily remove them from the Participants menu. However over their name, and the Remove option (among other options) will appear. Click to remove them from your virtual classroom, and they won’t be allowed back in.

How to Remove Participants:

  1. Click Manage Participants in the host controls to display the participants list:
     

  2. Click the More above Participant name(to whom you want to remove), a window will pop-up and select Remove. 

Additionally, Virtual Classes can be password protected, which acts as an added layer of security, for every class a new password being generated and it is enabled for the all meetings started through edmingle platform