Zoom

Zoom Privacy and Security in Good Shepherd’s Distance Learning Initiative

At Good Shepherd, we take the privacy and security of our technology infrastructure very seriously. As you know, our response to COVID-19 has been to initiate a Distance Learning education model that rests upon our technology infrastructure. While most of the tools we’ve employed are familiar to both our students and our faculty, a few are not. In particular, Zoom is a new tool to help facilitate face-to-face meetings from a distance. It has been a good platform for us to get our initiative up and running quickly. The best practice use of Zoom does involve a bit of a learning curve. Accordingly, as you might imagine, our rapid deployment has not been without its challenges.

Once such challenge is the privacy and security involved within each meeting. Recognizing the learning curve involved with this new tool in this new educational environment, Zoom has been very proactive in helping our faculty and staff use their tool in the most productive, safe and secure manner. They have made modifications to default settings as well as publish the guidelines, listed below, to help our users better manage their tool.

In closing, please know that our faculty and staff are committed to using all or our education technology tools in the safest, most appropriate way. Zoom’s best practices have been shared with everyone and they will be implementing these suggestions into their daily practices.

Additionally, please know that we will continue to constantly evaluate the use of every tool in our program, especially as we navigate the uncertainty around the duration of our current environment. If there are new tools or enhancements we can make to current tools that better improve the privacy and security, we will make changes accordingly.

As always, please let me know if you have questions. If you need technical support, please visit familytechsupport.gsesdallas.org for resources and options for more direct tech support from our Good Shepherd team.

Darryl Loy

Director of Technology

Good Shepherd Episcopal School

From Zoom Communications

1. Be careful who you share the link to your public calls with, try to avoid putting it on social media so that it stays away from trolls.

2. Avoid using your Personal Meeting ID to host public events

3. Using the Waiting Room feature to help control who comes and who goes, don’t let unexpected guests in.

4. Manage your screen sharing — set the app so that only the host of the Zoom call can screen share.

5. Manage your participants — change the settings so that only people who are signed-in to their account with the email they were invited to the call through can join the call. (Not possible for us right now.)

6. Lock the meeting after everyone you want there is there, that way no new people can join.

7. Set up two-factor authentication, then share the Meeting ID and password only with people you trust.

8. Remember that as the host you can disable the camera and mute certain participants, permanently or temporarily if needed, you can also remove them.

9. Turn off file transfers, private chat and annotations.