Zoom: Join By Dialing the Phone

Hello, my name is Ricky Enger, and today we're going to join a Zoom meeting by dialing in from our phone. We'll get connected, and then we'll go through a couple of really important things we need to know about for a typical Zoom meeting. If you want to learn about joining a Zoom meeting from an app on your smartphone or from a computer, check out the other workshops in our Zoom series to get up to speed.

Okay, so today we wanna join our Zoom meeting by phone, right? We've got our phone all ready to go, and we just received an email inviting us to a practice Zoom meeting. Awesome. Now, in another workshop in this series, we talked about the things we need to take note of in an invite like this in order to join. Be sure and check out that workshop first, if you haven't already. So we've made a note of our dial-in number, as well as our meeting ID. Let's get dialing and see what happens.

Zoom Operator: Welcome to Zoom. Enter your meeting ID, followed by pound.

Ricky: All right, we'll enter our meeting ID and we'll need to do this quickly because otherwise Zoom is gonna.

Zoom Operator: You have not entered any numbers. Please reenter your meeting ID, followed by pound.

Ricky: Yeah, yeah, Zoom, we get it. It can be hard not to get rattled when that voice is basically telling us to hurry up, but it's okay if it takes a couple of tries to enter our number. So we'll enter our meeting ID and then we'll press pound.

Zoom Operator: Enter your participant ID, followed by pound. Otherwise, just press pound to continue.

Ricky: We don't have a participant ID and we actually don't need one so let's just press pound.

Zoom Operator: You are in the meeting now. There is one other participant in the meeting.

Ricky: Yay, we made it. Okay, now that we're in, let's talk about a couple of important things that will be really useful in Zoom meetings. First, let's talk about muting and un-muting. We all have background noise sometimes, right? The dog starts barking or the TV is on or we just need to say something to another person in the house. So being able to keep that stuff from being heard by everyone else in the meeting is really helpful.

Now, every person who hosts a Zoom meeting might approach this differently. Some hosts will make sure everyone is muted when they come into the room and some will start with everyone un-muted. We'll know what our mute status is because Zoom will tell us if we're muted.

Zoom Operator: You are muted.

Ricky: Okay, good to know, but what do we do if we're muted and we wanna speak up about something? We can unmute ourselves by pressing our star key and then the number six so we'll do that.

Zoom Operator: You are un-muted.

Ricky: Nice, and when we're done, star six again.

Zoom Operator: You are muted.

Ricky: Perfect. Now, in some meetings, it's kind of informal and we can speak up whenever we want. But for many meetings, there are lots of people in the room and our host needs to keep things organized and moving along smoothly. So in this case, it's really great to notify our hosts that we have something to say and then our host can slot us in for a turn to speak. So how do we do that?

Well, it's kind of like being in a classroom. We'll raise our hand and to do that, we'll press the star key and the number nine.

Zoom Operator: The host will be informed that you would like to speak.

Ricky: Nice. Now the host will see that we have something to say. At some point, the host will call on us to speak and we'll either be un-muted by the host or the host will ask us to unmute. So just be ready for that star six if the host asks to unmute.

Now, there's one weird thing about raising our hand on the phone and this doesn't happen when joining through other methods. Unlike our mute command, which lets us switch from muted to un-muted and back again, when we raise our hand, we can't put it down. So basically if we press star nine, our hand will just stay up until the host calls on us. At that point, the host will lower our hand for us once we ask our question or make our comment. So just to recap, star six will mute and unmute and star nine will raise our hand. And when our Zoom meeting is over, there's nothing special that we need to do to get out of the meeting room. We can just hang up and end the call.

That really was a great meeting, wasn't it? I'm Ricky Enger and I want to thank you for joining me to learn about dialing into a Zoom meeting. See you next time.