How to Use Breakout Rooms in Zoom
Zoom allows you to break the students into smaller groups. You will have the option to generate the rooms automatically (participants randomly assigned) or manually (you assign participants to the groups).
Tip: When using breakout rooms, make sure students have a clear task to complete within their groups and check in with them to hold them accountable to the task afterward.
Start Breakout Groups
When in a meeting, begin breakout rooms by selecting the Breakout Rooms icon at the bottom of the screen.
Once selected, a pop-up will appear asking how many rooms you want to create. You will also choose if you want all of the participants distributed randomly (and evenly) among the rooms, if you want to manually assign people to each group, or if you want to allow participants to choose their own rooms. Once finalized, select Create.
After creating the rooms, you will see all of the participants in their assigned groups. You can move participants between the rooms and rename the groups. To begin breakout rooms, select Open All Rooms.
Once the participants are in their breakout rooms, as the host, you will be able to monitor the activity status of each breakout room participant within the Breakout Rooms page. This includes seeing who is sharing their screen, any reactions from participants, which participant is speaking, etc. However, you will not be able to hear what is being said in each breakout room without joining the room.
Note: You can also create breakout rooms from poll results. See the Polling page for more information.
Move Between Rooms
As the host, you will remain in the main meeting room while everyone else is split off. You can open the Breakout Rooms window again and move between the groups by selecting the blue Join button next to each room's title. You can also move participants to different rooms by hovering over their names and selecting which room you want them in.
Broadcast to Breakout Rooms
There are a few ways you can broadcast to breakout rooms. You can send a written message, send an audio message, or share content with the participants.
To send a written message to the entire group, Broadcast a message to all is a feature that will allow you to type a message to be sent to all of the groups. Find this at the bottom of the Breakout Rooms window.
Please note that the broadcast message will appear at the top of the participant's screen for approximately five seconds and not in the Chat feature of Zoom. If you plan to use this feature, let your participants know to keep an eye out for these messages since they have a limited amount of time to receive this information.
If you'd like to send an audio message to the breakout rooms, open the Breakout Rooms window. Click Broadcast and then Broadcast Voice. Next, select the broadcast voice icon (a blue icon) to begin broadcasting your audio to all breakout rooms. Click the stop icon when you're finished.
Note: You can press and hold the B key on your keyboard to broadcast your voice as needed.
Lastly, you can share content to breakout rooms by clicking on Share Screen and then checking the box next to Share to breakout room found in the lower, left-hand corner of the Share Screen page. Remember to select Share sound if desired. From there, proceed with sharing content as you would outside of breakout rooms by selecting the content you'd like to send and then clicking Share.
End Breakouts
Within the Breakout Rooms page, select the Close All Rooms on the bottom right to have participants return to the main meeting.
Tips for Using Breakout Rooms
Group Assignment
Group assignments can be set up either automatically or manually. You can also reuse groups that were previously created automatically.
Number of Rooms
Up to 50 breakout rooms may be created at a time.
Monitoring Rooms
As the host, you can join one breakout room at a time. To monitor students' progress across all rooms, create a Google Doc that everyone can edit and ask students to make notes while working in their groups. This way, you can track all groups' progress in a single document. Share the Google Doc link in the chat and have students open it before they break out into groups, as they won't have access to the main room chat once they're in their groups.
If you prefer that groups don't see each other's discussions, you can share a separate Google Doc with each group and open multiple windows to monitor their progress.
Recordings
Cloud recordings do not capture breakout rooms. To record breakout rooms, grant recording permissions to participants by hovering over their name in the Participants panel. They can then save the recording as an MP4 file on their personal device.