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Using Breakout Rooms

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(Source: Digital Unite’s No-Nonsense Guide to Hosting Zoom Meetings)

These enable participants to be split off into smaller groups – brilliant for small group discussion (or even pub quiz teams!) The host will need to enable breakout rooms in the meeting settings before the meeting. Then once in the meeting, the host can click on breakout rooms which will be visible in the bottom tool bar and either randomly or manually allocate people to the room. The host can also join any of the meeting rooms.

Things to note:

– The host can’t launch breakout rooms from a tablet or phone – it has to be on a computer.

– The main room will always stay open and people can choose to return to it at any time.

– If recording the meeting, only the main room and not the breakout rooms are recorded.

– You can set an automatic length for the breakout rooms and participants will see a count down warning them to re-join the main meeting before the breakout room closes.

– You can move between the main room and the breakout rooms as many times as you like during the meeting – this may disrupt group work though!

– You can change the allocation of participants to the room each time, or keep it the same.

Video Tutorial

Here is the guide by Zoom (will open in a new tab), including specific info for different devices.