Top 10 Zoom keyboard shortcuts for music teachers

If you too can no longer do without Zoom in your everyday life as a music teacher, then this article is for you! Here are the top 10 keyboard shortcuts you need to know to make your life easier.

Whether you’re team Mac or team Windows, here’s how to perform useful actions on Zoom such as muting all participants, switching between diffent views, or managing different cameras.

Let’s get started!

#1 – Switch between tabs: Control+T (Mac) | F6 (Windows)

Stop losing time searching what you need. As a teacher you have to lead the class fast. So that feature is a real ally during your sessions. With one button you are able to circulate between all the windows of your screen.

#2 – Switch to speaker display: Command(⌘)+Shift+W (Mac) | Alt+F1 (Windows)

Thanks to that tip, you won’t have to search in the whole class which student is speaking. There is nothing that annoys me more than trying to find which of them is speaking before he stops.

You all know this moment where a student is speaking and disrupting your class. You take the risk to ask the famous innocent question “who is talking ?”, and suddenly, you could hear the flies flying. Do not forget this feature, it could be very useful to you!

#3 – Switch to gallery display: Command(⌘)+Shift+W (Mac) | Alt+F2 (Windows)

If you need to have an overview of all your team in one click! When you are teaching online, what is missing is the presence of your student and the feeling to be seated on a chair in front of your class.

As you might know, there doesn’t exist such a feature on Zoom. But the video gallery is what is closest to this image. You can see all of your students on the same screen and have the impression they are all looking at you as if you were in front of them.

#4 – Share your screen: Command(⌘)+Control+S (Mac) | Alt+S (Windows)

Launch the screen sharing window and stop screen sharing. Stop losing time searching where the button to close the window of the sharing screen is. Everybody knows this moment before sharing its screen where you can’t find the right button!

This time is over now thanks to this magical feature. You will be able to share every score and content you need in a single click.

#5 – Mute/Restore sound: Command(⌘)+Shift+A (Mac) | Alt+A (Windows)

It’s something very useful when you are having a conversation with your students. Very quickly it can become difficult to discuss with others when you’re online. So thanks to this you can mute yourself and let the others talk.

#6 – Mute everyone except the host: Command(⌘)+Control+M (Mac) | Alt+M (Windows)

This is the top one Zoom shortcut for music teachers. I would bet that you have been struggling at least once with a giant mess when your entire class of teenagers joined with their mics on and started a debate on how the weekend went… and you engaged in manually muting them all to retake control of the situation.

Well, if you’re ever in this situation again, remember this shortcut: Command(⌘)+Control+M, with which you can mute all participants at once… except for you. Instant power, how nice does that feel?

And don’t worry: only the host gets this superpower.

#7 – Switch camera: Command(⌘)+Shift+N (Mac) | Alt+N (Windows)

Ok, so you felt good about your Zoom setup but you wanted to upgrade it, and got a second camera to get a better view of your piano. But how do you switch between this and your headshot view?

The answer is: Alt+N for team Windows, or Command(⌘)+Shift+N for team Mac. See how easy this gets?

#8 – Start recording your session to your local computer: Command(⌘)+Shift+R (Mac) | Alt+R (Windows)

If a student misses a class, it’s even harder for him to catch things up now that we moved to online lessons… unless you provide them with a recording of the session!

Use this keyboard shortcut to quickly start recording your Zoom meeting to your local computer when you realize someone is missing. For scheduled meetings, you can also turn this on in the settings of the meeting.

If you use Newzik in addition to Zoom, you can then upload the recording of the session to your class’s Project, so students can visualize the scores and exercises along with the video session very easily.

#9 – Start recording your session to the cloud: Command(⌘)+Shift+C (Mac) | Alt+C (Windows)

Basically the same trick as before, except this time you’re recording to the cloud.

Not only does that save your precious hard disk space, it also prevents you from accidentally deleting a previously recorded session.

#10 – Pause/Restart session recording: Command(⌘)+Shift+P (Mac) | Alt+P (Windows)

Last in the session recording book of shortcuts: with this combination you can pause and restart the screen recording.

This is a nice trick to remember if you don’t have a multi-camera setup. Before you move your computer to a different view angle, pause the recording. Restart it when you’re all set with the new angle. This way, the final result will be cleaner, without the transitions between the different views.

Conclusion

Even if Zoom is very useful and has a lot of features, it remains an incomplete tool for music teachers. You have the ability to talk to your students and maintain a certain course structure. But it’s not the best resource to prepare, share and organize your lessons in class.

Newzik Education is the perfect platform to complement Zoom for music teachers. With both Newzik and your video conferencing software, you can take new and more engaging approaches to online teaching using to digital scores.