Presentations on Zoom

Giving a Presentation or Lecture on Zoom

This page describes how to give a presentation on Zoom (for example students giving a final project presentation remotely, or teachers needing to pre-record a lecture remotely). These instructions will work either for a live presentation during class or for a pre-recorded presentation to submit on Canvas. These instructions assume you're also using PowerPoint, but the process would be the same for KeyNote, Prezi, or any other kind of presentation.

For a Live Presentation: We recommend that you practice the presentation ahead of time, following these instructions for a recorded presentation. That way, you can practice the timing and see how it looks before doing the presentation live in class.

Start an Empty Zoom Meeting

Before you start your meeting, you should have your PowerPoint ready to go ahead of time so that once you start the recording, you can quickly switch over to your presentation. You can start a Zoom meeting even if no one else will be in the meeting. You will use this empty meeting to record your presentation.

Open the Zoom app and go to "Home" then click "New Meeting" (1). Click "Join with Computer Audio" (2) and the meeting will start. Next, click "Share Screen" (3) and choose to share the whole screen (4), the click the "Share" button (5).

Next, start your PowerPoint presentation, and when you're read to start, go to Zoom and click "Record" (6) then "Record on this Computer" (7).

Show Your Presentation

Your computer will now be recording your presentation, your voice, and your video. Go through your presentation. If there's a section where you will just be speaking, you can click the "Pause Share" button at the top of the screen, then click "Resume Share" when you want to show your PowerPoint again.

Likewise, you can pause the recording. Click the "Pause" and "Resume" icons that appear near the top-left of your webcam image.

When you are finished with the presentation, you can stop the recording, or just end the meeting by clicking "End" then "End Meeting for All"

Note for Live Presentations: If you're presenting during a live class session, just click the red "Stop Share" link at the top of the screen you're sharing. Don't end the meeting.

Sharing the Recording

As soon as you end the meeting, you will see a notification that Zoom is processing the video:

Once that process finishes, Zoom will open up the folder where it saved the recording (usually in "Documents / Zoom"). The file name will typically be something like "zoom_0" and we recommend renaming the file with your name and a description:

Open that file to watch your recording.

An easy way to share that recording would be to put that file into your Google Drive or upload to YouTube, then submit to Canvas or share using a link.

Share Video on Google Drive

To share this video on Google Drive, open https://drive.google.com/drive/my-drive and drag the file (1) somewhere into your drive. It may be helpful to create a folder first, to keep things organized.

Wait for the upload to finish ("Finishing upload...") then right-click on the file (2) and choose Get Link (3)

Change the audience from "Restricted" to "Anyone with the link" (4) or you could choose just people at your school or organization. Click "Copy link" (5) then Done (6).

You can then paste the link wherever you need to. If you are submitting this on Canvas, you could put the link into a Word document and submit the Word document. Or you can paste it directly into a discussion forum, the text box of an assignment, or an email.

Anyone with the link will be able to view your presentation. (After a few moments. It will take about five minutes for Google Drive to process your video before others can view it.)