Ever hosted a Zoom meeting and wanted to mark-up the content on the screen to help identify key items? Try the annotation feature that allows you and your meeting participants to add notes, drawings, and highlights to the content that is shared on your screens. This feature works great to help a team work collaboratively and edit projects like a report or presentation, or to show steps on how to solve an equation, like you would on a whiteboard.

Enabling Annotation

To get started, enable Annotation in your Zoom account:

1. Log into zoom.temple.edu and then click Settings in the menu on the left.
2. Under the Meeting tab, scroll down to Annotation.
3. Click on the toggle so that it turns blue to enable Annotation. 
4. If you would like to have the ability to save the screens with any annotations you make, and/or if you would only like the user who is sharing the screen to have annotation capabilities, then click on the appropriate checkboxes.

Using Annotation

Once you have the annotation feature enabled, you can start annotating during your meetings by accessing the annotation tools. To access the tools:

1. Share your screen by clicking Share Screen in your meeting tool bar. 
2. Choose to either share the content that you are currently viewing on your screen or select Whiteboard to share a blank whiteboard screen with you and your meeting participants.
3. When you want to start annotating, click Annotate in the menu bar at the top of the screen to bring up annotation options. If you don’t see Annotate in your menu bar, move your cursor to the top of the screen if it appears or click More, then Annotate.
   If you're sharing a blank whiteboard, the annotation options will already be visible. If you would like to hide them, click Whiteboard in the menu bar at the top of the screen. To make them visible again, re-click Whiteboard.
4. Once you click Annotate or Whiteboard, the different annotation tools will appear, such as Text, Draw, Stamp, Eraser. To learn more about the different annotation tools and their functions, see the Zoom article for using annotation tools.

Allowing Participants to Annotate

In the middle of hosting a meeting and decide that you would like other participants to also annotate the shared screen? Click More in the screen share controls at the top of the screen and then click Enable/Disable Annotation for Others to allow participants to annotate too.

Meeting participants then annotate the shared screen by following the same steps above. You can also choose to hide or show the name of the participants when they are annotating by clicking More in the screen share controls and then clicking Hide/Show Names of Annotators.

Saving Your Annotations

Wrapping up with the meeting and want to save the annotations made? In the annotation tool bar, click Save and Zoom will save a screenshot of your screen with the annotations to the local recording destination. The screenshots will be stored in your Documents/Zoom folder.