How to Teach on Zoom in 2026: Settings, Whiteboard, Breakout Rooms and the Three Jobs Zoom Leaves to You

Zoom is the right call for most teachers, and not because it is the best video app. It is the one every parent and every adult student already has installed, which means the first five minutes of your first class are spent teaching instead of troubleshooting. The problems people have teaching on Zoom are almost never Zoom's fault. They are setup problems, and this is the setup.

What follows is for a class of one to thirty, taught live, by one teacher: the free-versus-Pro decision, the ten settings to change before your first session, how to run a whiteboard and share a tablet, how to use breakout rooms without losing the room, and the three jobs Zoom was never going to do for you. Prices and limits were read from Zoom's pricing page on October 16, 2026.

Free or Pro

The free Basic plan ends every meeting at 40 minutes, allows 100 participants, includes breakout rooms and three editable whiteboards, and records to your own disk only. Pro is $16.99 a month ($14.16 a month on an annual plan) and lifts the meeting limit to 30 hours, adds 10 GB of cloud recording, and is the plan on which Zoom's usage reports, the ones that list who joined and when, are available; a free account does not get an attendance export.

The decision is simpler than the plan page makes it look. The 40-minute cap applies to every meeting on Basic, one-to-one included, so a 55-minute private lesson means a restart halfway through. If you teach more than twice a week, buy Pro and stop thinking about it; the cap costs you more in restarted meetings than $17 does. If every lesson fits in 40 minutes, Basic works, and the cap is a decent forcing function for lesson length. For one-to-one tutoring there is a third option: Google Meet's free tier runs a two-person call for up to 24 hours, which is why some tutors use Meet for private lessons and Zoom for groups. The free-plan caps of Zoom's rivals are no more generous, which is worth knowing before you switch apps to dodge a $17 bill.

Ten settings before the first class

All of these live in the web portal under Settings, not in the desktop app, and most are account-wide, so you set them once.

Waiting room on. Nobody enters until you admit them. It is the single setting that keeps a stranger out of a class of children, and it lets you start the room, share your screen and settle before the first student sees anything.
Passcode required. Zoom embeds it in the link, so students never type it. It stops a forwarded meeting ID from working on its own.
Mute on entry. Students arrive muted. Thirty people unmuting a kitchen each is the sound of a class that has not started yet.
Screen sharing: host only. Students can still be given the share when you ask for it. Leaving it open to everyone invites the accidental desktop.
Annotation off for participants, until you need it. Turn it on when the activity calls for it. Off by default stops the drawing-on-the-slide game.
Chat to host only for under-13s, everyone for adults. Younger classes do better with the chat as a line to you. Adult classes use it as a backchannel, which is good.
No renaming. A roster you can read is an attendance list you can take. Students who can rename themselves become "iPhone" by week three.
Breakout rooms on, with pre-assignment allowed. You cannot create rooms mid-class if the setting is off at the account level, and you want the option to set the groups when you schedule.
Recording consent prompt on, automatic recording off. Students see a notice when recording starts, which is both polite and, in many places, required. Start recordings by hand so a parent conference does not end up on your disk by accident.
A recurring meeting with a fixed ID for each course. One link for the whole term. The link goes in the welcome email once, and the "what's the link" messages stop.

The whiteboard, and sharing an iPad

Zoom's built-in Whiteboard is fine for a diagram and poor for handwriting with a mouse. Three editable boards come with Basic, and they persist between sessions, so the board you started on Monday is still there on Wednesday.

For anything that needs handwriting, math and languages above all, share a tablet instead. On a Mac, plug the iPad in with a cable and choose the "iPhone/iPad via Cable" option in the share menu; the first time, both devices ask you to trust the connection. On Windows or Mac, "iPhone/iPad via AirPlay" mirrors over Wi-Fi as long as both devices are on the same network, at lower quality. Either way you write on the iPad with a stylus and the class sees it full screen. A document camera pointed at paper does the same job for less money and no setup.

Two sharing habits that save a class. First, share a window, not the whole screen, so notifications and your other tabs stay yours. Second, when a student shares work, ask them to share a window too, and keep annotation available so you can mark on it.

Breakout rooms without losing the room

Breakout rooms are the reason to teach a group on Zoom rather than a video call app that does not have them. Three rules make them work.

Set a timer when you open the rooms and let Zoom close them automatically; a group with no clock talks about the weekend. Give the task in the main room, in writing in the chat, before you open the rooms, because the chat does not follow students in. Visit the rooms in a fixed order and spend under two minutes in each; students who have to ask for help can use the help button and you will see it from wherever you are.

Pairs for language practice, three or four for problem sets, never more than five: beyond that one person works and the rest watch. If the groups matter, assign them when you schedule rather than letting Zoom shuffle.

A rhythm for a 55-minute class

Open the room five minutes early with your screen already shared and something on it, so the first student in has something to look at. Spend the first three minutes on names and one question in the chat, which doubles as your attendance check. Teach for no more than fifteen minutes before students do something: a problem, a breakout, a question answered in the chat. Close with two minutes of "what we did and what is due", said out loud and typed into the chat, then stop the recording before the goodbyes.

Cameras on is a policy to set in the first session and never relitigate: on for the first and last five minutes at least, and on during breakouts. Use the gallery view to teach and spotlight yourself only when you are demonstrating. If your account has focus mode, turn it on for younger groups; students see only you and their own video, which removes most of the reasons a camera goes off.

The three jobs Zoom leaves to you

Here is the part the Zoom tutorials skip. The meeting is maybe a third of running a class, and Zoom does the meeting well. The rest is yours.

Attendance. On a free account there is no record of who came. On Pro there is a usage report with join and leave times, which you export as a spreadsheet and reconcile against your roster by hand, every session. Neither one knows that the student who joined at 7:20 was late or that a no-show is chargeable.

Getting paid. Zoom Meetings has no checkout. Charging for a class means a payment link somewhere else, a list of who paid, and a way to get the join link to only those people. For a one-off workshop it is a spreadsheet; for a term it is a part-time job.

Everything between sessions. The recording is on your disk, the homework is in an email, the file a student shared in the chat is gone when the meeting ends, and the question a parent asked is in a text thread. None of it is in one place a student can find on Sunday night.

That is where a layer around Zoom earns its keep. Classentra runs on top of your own Zoom account: it generates the meeting link per session, records attendance when students join, holds the materials, assignments and gradebook, and takes payment and enrolment so only enrolled students get the link. We costed a tutor's Zoom, Calendly and Stripe stack against doing it in one place, and wrote up when a tutor should keep plain Zoom and when to switch.

Before the first class

Run a ten-minute rehearsal with one friend on a different device: join from the link, test the waiting room, share a window, open one breakout room, start and stop a recording. Then send the welcome email with the one link, the time with its time zone, and a line about cameras. Our launch checklist for a first live class has the rest.

If you already teach on Zoom and the three jobs above are eating your evenings, Classentra sits on top of your Zoom account and does them. Start free below, no card required.