Feather River College Campus
Distance Education

TechConnect Zoom

Funded by a grant from the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, TechConnect Zoom is a web conferencing system used by administrators, faculty and staff of the CCC system. It runs on technology powered by Zoom, but it is branded for the CCCs. 

Faculty can use TechConnect Zoom inside or outside of Canvas to communicate with their students in real time. It is mainly used in asynchronous online courses for office hours, tutoring sessions, or other appointments between the instructor and students. It is used in synchronous online courses to deliver instruction in real time.

If you want to use TechConnect Zoom within Canvas, adhere to these important points:

  1. Faculty needing a TechConnect Zoom account should contact the Canvas administrator (jreilley@frc.edu or kdesmond@frc.edu).
  2. Having a Zoom account IS NOT the same as having a TechConnect Zoom account. Only TechConnect Zoom accounts work within Canvas.
  3. If you have a TechConnect Zoom account at a college outside of FRC, you will not be able to use it within our district's Canvas system.
  4. If, for some reason, TechConnect Zoom will not work for you in Canvas, you can go to conferzoom.org (sign in at the bottom of the page), and create a meeting, copy the invitation to the meeting and send to your students. They then can meet you outside of Canvas. At some point, conferzoom.org is supposed to change to clpccd-org.zoom.us.
  5. Students do not need an account to participate in a TechConnect Zoom meeting within their Canvas course. 
  6. If you want to set up appointments in Canvas for students to book, use Tech Connect Zoom's Student Connect tool. This tool does not show up in your course menu by default; you have to enable it by going to Settings - Course Navigation. To learn how to use Student Connect, see the Student Connect - Instructor Overview. You can also view a video on how Student Connect works.
  7. TechConnect Zoom integrates with the Canvas Calendar tool, so when you set up meetings, students can access them from their Calendars. Please note that copying meetings from one course to another—particularly from one semester to the next—will not work. You’ll need to re-create the meetings in the new course. It doesn’t matter which copying options you choose.
  8. Prior to implementing TechConnect Zoom with your students, be sure to consider student privacy, however, there is no prohibition against faculty requiring students to have their cameras on for live online synchronous classes. However, instructors should understand that students may be unable or uncomfortable sharing their location or background. Instructors need to be aware of privacy rights granted to students under the California State and U.S. Constitutions. 
  9. If you or your students have trouble connecting to Zoom from the Chrome or Firefox web browsers, view instructions on how to resolve the issue.
  10. Do not give students any other role in your Canvas course not just because this causes privacy issues in the course, but also because that role carries over to Zoom. This means that the student whose role was changed in Canvas will not be able to access their Zoom meeting as a student.
  11. To hide students when recording your class meeting, first, make sure you are recording to the cloud, then follow these steps:
    • Go to conferzoom.org (sign in at the bottom of the page), then click Settings. At some point, conferzoom.org is supposed to change to clpccd-org.zoom.us.
    • Select the Recording tab, then under Cloud Recording:
      • Select Record active speaker and shared screen
      • Deselect Record gallery view with shared screen
      • Deselect Record active speaker, gallery view and shared screen separately
      • Deselect Display participants' names in the recording
    • When you start your meeting, keep your Zoom view set to Speaker View (as opposed to Gallery View)

Teaching with TechConnect Zoom

Avoiding Zoombombing

If you are using TechConnect Zoom outside of Canvas and are concerned that people outside of your class will virtually hack, or "zoombomb", your meeting, follow these security tips:

TechConnect Zoom Resources

This site provides information using PDF, visit this link to download the Adobe Acrobat Reader DC software.