As a Zoom Meeting Host, you have special administrator privileges. The host controls will appear at the bottom of your screen if you are not currently screen sharing as shown below.
You can also make a participant of the meeting a co-host who can assist in running the meeting doing things such as muting/unmuting participants, letting people in from the waiting room if you choose to use a waiting room, or recording the meeting.
A Co-Host has all of the same admin privileges as shown in the rest of this tutorial, EXCEPT for the following:
- Start closed captioning and assign someone or a third-party to provide closed captioning
- Start live streaming
- End meeting for all participants
- Make another participant a co-host
- Start waiting-room (co-hosts can place participants in waiting room or admit/remove participants from the waiting room)
Co-hosts also cannot start a meeting. If a host needs someone else to be able to start the meeting, they can assign an alternative host.
The following tutorial will explain the controls that you as a host have including Security and Participants controls, Screen Sharing, Recording the Meeting, Closed Captioning and Breakout Rooms . To learn more in depth about the options available, see corresponding Help Desk Articles, or visit the Zoom online Manuel at https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362603-Host-and-Co-Host-Controls-in-a-Meeting
Security
The Security Menu gives options for what the host allows the participants to do.
- Lock Meeting: Locks the meeting, keeping new participants from joining the meeting. This should be left off usually.
- Enable Waiting Room: Enables Waiting Room for incoming new participants or to move current participants into the Waiting Room. If the Waiting Room is enabled, participants will first pop up in a “waiting-room” sub menu of the participants menu, and must be manually let into the session.
**In a classroom setting this should probably be disabled, so that students can come back if their Internet drops out, or they leave for any reason or come in late. If a teacher is hosting the meeting as a class, the teacher might not notice that somebody is in the waiting room trying to get in.**
- Hide Profile Pictures: Hide all profile pictures, including the host. Display names are shown instead.
Allow participants to:
- Share Screen: Allows participants to share their screens.
- Chat: Allows participants to use the chat function.
- Rename Themselves: Allows participants to rename themselves from the Participants panel.
- Unmute Themselves: Allows participants to unmute themselves without the host's permission.
- Start Video: Allows participants to start their video in the meeting..
- Remove Participant: Allows the removal of a participant from a meeting. The participant can not re-join unless Allow removed participants to rejoin is enabled in “Meeting Settings”.
- Suspend Participant Activities: Turn off all participant's video, audio, Zoom Apps, and ability to share their screen. Also lock the meeting to prevent participants from joining. This will apply to all participants, including those joined using a Zoom Room.
Participants
The button to the right of the security button turns on the “Participants” Window, which will appear to the right of your zoom screen. On the top left arrow of that window you can click that and “pop out” the window to be able to move it around wherever you want as shown below.
On the bottom of the participants window is a convenient “Mute All” button and also an “Invite” button as show above.
The “Invite” button brings you to this screen where you can enter a Zoom users email account and Zoom will invite them via email, or you can click the “Copy Invite Link” on the bottom left of the page and it will copy a link to your clipboard that you can paste to someone else, say in an instant messenger app or in an email.
Going back to the Participants Menu Clicking on the “… (more)” button on the bottom right of the participants menu as shown below brings you to some important options that will apply to all participants, some of which we have seen before in the security section:
- Ask All to Unmute: Display a pop-up notification to all muted participants with option to unmute themselves or stay muted.
- Mute Participants upon Entry: Automatically mute participants as they join the meeting. This is HIGHLY RECCOMENDED, as a meeting host doesn’t want participants to accidentally say or share things as they come into the meeting not knowing that their microphones are active.
- Allow Participants to Unmute Themselves: Participants can unmute themselves if they want to speak to others in the meeting.
- Allow Participants to Rename Themselves: Participants can change their screen name displayed to other participants.
- Play sound when someone joins or leaves: Play a sound when participants join and leave the meeting
- Play Chime for Chat Messages/Raise Hand: Play a sound when participants use in-meeting chat or raise their hand. Please contact Zoom support to have this feature enabled for your account.
- Enable Waiting Room: Enable the Waiting Room feature. This option is available regardless of the web portal setting.
- Lock meeting: Don't allow other participants to join the meeting in progress.
- Merge to meeting window: Merge the participants list with the main meeting window. This option is only available if you separated the participants list from the main meeting window.
In the Participant Window if we click on a Participant it will bring up a sub menu with individual controls for that Participant. Click the “more” button to see all of the options available as shown below.
- Chat: Open the chat window to send messages directly to the participant.
- Stop Video: Stop the participant's video stream so they are unable to start their video. If the participant hasn't started their video, you will see the Ask to Start Video option.
- Pin: Pin up to 9 Participants videos so that it is always visible on your screen. This will not affect other participants.
- Spotlight for Everyone: Spotlight up to 9 participants videos, so that their videos are always visible for all participants in the meeting.
- Make Host (only available to the host): Assign the participant to be the host. There can only be one host.
- Make Co-Host / Remove Co-host Permissions(only available to the host): Assign the participant to be a co-host. You can have an unlimited number of co-hosts.
- Rename: Change the participant name that is displayed to other participants. This change only applies to the current meeting.
Note: To change your own name that is displayed, hover over your name in the participants list and click Rename. You can permanently change your name in your profile.
- Assign to type Closed Caption (only available to the host): Assign the participant to type closed caption during the meeting.
- Allow to Record Local Files (only available to the host): Allow the participant to start or stop a local recording of the meeting. Participants do not have access to start a cloud recording.
- Allow to Multi-pin: Allows another participant to use the multi-pin feature. By default, participants can only pin 1 participant at a time.
- Put in Waiting Room: Place the participant in a virtual waiting room while you prepare for the meeting. The host must enable waiting room for this option to appear.
- Put On Hold: If the waiting room is not enabled, you'll see this option to place the participant on hold.
- Remove: Dismiss a participant from the meeting. They won't be able to rejoin unless you allow removed participants to rejoin in the meeting setup settings..
- Report: Allows you to report a user to Zoom's Trust and Safety team. You will be able to select which user to report and provide details about the problem. You can also upload evidence, such as screenshots.
Screen Sharing
Continuing along the control bar, Share Screen has an arrow next to it as shown below.
Here you can quickly set if you want only one participant to be able to share at a time, or if multiple participants can share simultaneously. Click the "Advanced Sharing Options" to get to this screen shown below.
Here the host can decide if Participants are allowed to share their screens at all, and if so the "Who can start sharing when someone else is sharing" will stop participants from accidentally interrupting each other.
Polling
Polling 
: Allows you to create, edit, and launch your polls. The options to create or launch polls will open up the Zoom web portal in your default browser. When the poll closes, you can view the results and can download the full poll report. If a poll has already been created, both host and co-host can launch the poll, but only the host can edit or add polls to the meeting.
Recording
This allows the host or co-host to start or stop a cloud or local recording.
Closed Caption/Live Transcript
(only available to the host): If you have enabled closed captioning or live transcript for your account, click here to access the closed caption options.
Breakout Rooms
Here you as the meeting host can create or open your pre-assigned breakout rooms. See the help desk articles "Pre-Assigning Breakout Rooms in Zoom" or "Creating Breakout Rooms During a Zoom Meeting" for further detail.