Why Zoom Breakout Rooms are valuable
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Are you using Zoom for teaching or training purposes, or perhaps you just want to spice up your meetings and break off your participants into smaller discussion groups?
Well, in today's video I want to show you everything you need to know about breakout rooms in Zoom.
Hello everyone
Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity
Helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress
And here I've set up a bit of a fake meeting, I've got four different people, shall we say they're just four different devices at this point.
And what I'd like to do is I'd like to break them off into smaller discussion groups.
Now before we get into selecting breakout rooms here.
How to turn on Zoom Breakout Rooms in Settings
I want to make sure that you have breakout rooms enabled.
So in order to do that, where we need to go is in your web browser, login to your Zoom account.
And when you're logged in, we want to come down to the Admin section, we are going to select Account Management, and then Account Settings.
Now this Account Settings page is pretty lengthy, so we have to scroll down almost halfway down this page to find what we're looking for.
We're going to come to a header here called In Meeting Advanced.
And the very first option here is breakout room.
So make sure that you have this turned on.
So let's jump back, now that things are enabled, let's jump back into our Zoom meeting here.
And let's say that I have kicked off the meeting, and I've given a bit of a lesson, or instruction, or maybe there's a very important topic that I want them to talk about.
How to Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom meeting
Amongst themselves in a smaller group.
So in order to do so, I need to come here and select Breakout Rooms.
Now we're going to get this little small window that's going to pop up in front of us on the screen.
And don't worry, Zoom is going to do all the math for us here.
So here, it's gonna say assign four participants into one room.
Well, that doesn't make a lot of sense, right? Because that would basically just kick myself out, they'll go talk amongst themselves, and then I would just be here sitting all alone.
Maybe there's a purpose for that, maybe you might use that in some case, but it's always going to do the math for you here.
So here, it's gonna tell me down below that there's going to be four participants per room.
If I start to toggle this, I can say, well, actually, this is what I want, four participants in two rooms.
It's gonna tell me there's gonna be two participants per room.
I can keep changing this number. Yeah, there's gonna be one to two participants.
Well, that's just basically gonna split everybody up into an individual room.
There's not actually a limit here, so it's not going to keep track of how many attendees you actually have.
So just be careful, they don't keep pushing this up, here you can see zero to one, you're gonna have a bunch of empty rooms if we keep doing that.
So let's break this down into two rooms, because that's what I want today.
And the only other option that we have here, or that we need to consider is if we want Zoom to automatically split these rooms up, just randomly split those four individuals up, or do I want to pick them myself.
Now the good thing is, is that the reason why automatically is set by default, because especially if you have a large group, you might want to quickly just do this and just let it do the math itself.
But even with the automatically option here, we can still make a few changes before those breakout rooms go live.
So I'm going to leave this at automatically and I'm going to say Create Rooms.
How to Edit Breakout Rooms before opening them up
And that's going to open up this dialog here.
So here you can see it's already automatically randomly split up my groups.
I've got Monica and Ted here and I've got Alex and Jane down here.
Now a couple of things that we can do, right off the bat you can see as I'm hovering over these names, I can move people to different rooms, or I can exchange them.
So what's the difference between these two?
Well, let's say Monica, I don't want Monica in the same room as Ted for some reason, I'm going to say Move to. If I select this, it's going to say, well, where do I want to move her to? Well, it's pretty obvious here, I've only got one other room.
So I'm going to say Breakout Room 2.
And there you can see that Monica is now moved into Breakout Room 2, let me just move her back here for this example.
And let's say rather, I want to exchange her with someone else. Well, that's the Exchange one here.
So if I select Exchange, I can now see, well, is it Alex or Jane? Let's swap Monica and Jane, so I'm going to select Jane.
And now you can see that those two swap out of those rooms.
Now you'll have a lot more options, of course, if you have many more rooms and many more participants, but this is a great easy way to quickly fine tune those breakout rooms before they go live.
The other thing which is nice here is that you see
How to Rename Breakout Rooms in Zoom
If I hover over the breakout rooms themselves, I can actually rename them.
So I could call this, this is the Blue breakout group.
And this is the Red breakout group, for example.
It could be the topic that you want them to discuss, whatever the case may be, you can rename them if desired.
So now I've got my room set.
These are the two people that I want to be paired up together for the small discussion, but we still have a few more options down here below.
How to Recreate Breakout Rooms in Zoom
You can see here in the bottom left hand corner, we've got a Recreate button.
Now if I select that, we're going to see the exact same dialog that we first saw before coming in here.
And this is basically sort of like a do over button.
This is saying, wait a minute, if this really is a mess, either you've messed it up, or Zoom has messed it up in some way, you can start all over again and say, let me divide up the rooms in a different way.
I want to pick them manually from the get-go, I can pick them manually from the start. I can do that here as well.
But don't worry about having to close this dialog, you can just come down here and say Recreate All Rooms if need be.
Advanced Breakout Room Options
The other thing that we have here is our options drop-down or menu here.
And let's go through each of these rather quickly, just so you understand what they each mean.
So the first one, Move all participants into breakout rooms automatically. I usually always have this checked.
And what this means is that when I say Open All Rooms, I want them all to jump into those rooms. I don't want them to have to select something to put them into those rooms, I like to try and keep it as simple as possible.
So by leaving this checked, when I say Open All Rooms, they're automatically going to be placed in those rooms.
Second one here, Allow participants to return to the main session at any time. When I say Open All Rooms here, I'm going to be the only one left here in what's called the main room.
If I have this checked, this allows participants to come back and rejoin me at their discretion, when they would like to.
So there may be some cases where you want to have this unchecked, that you want to keep them in their breakout rooms or maybe not accidentally have them rejoin you in the main room.
So this is allowing what kind of control you're giving those participants.
The third one down here is basically a timer, Breakout rooms close automatically after, and you can input any type of duration that you like.
So maybe you want them to go and spend some time talking amongst each other for 10 minutes, well, you could put 10 minutes in here, and Zoom is going to do the work for you.
They're going to count the timer down and then automatically bring everyone back together at that time.
Now if you do have this selected, the checkbox down below will become enabled, notifying you, the host, when that time is up. I can leave that unchecked for now.
And then the last one here is a countdown after closing the breakout room, and I really like this feature.
What it's going to do is that when I say, hey, it's time for us to get back together, what's going to happen, I can change the duration here. There's a few different defaults. I'm going to use 30 in our example.
What's going to happen is that they're going to see a countdown timer when there's 30 seconds left.
And so they know, I don't have to broadcast out a message, I don't have to go into each room, they know that, hey, we should probably start winding down, we're going to be rejoining that room.
Okay, so I've got my options, they're here. I could add another room, if I wanted to, if I wanted to say, actually, let's add one more room or I have more participants, I can do that here as well.
How to Launch Breakout Rooms for all participants
But let's go ahead, this is the big show, right?
Let's actually break out, I'm going to say Open All Rooms, you're going to see a few different areas here.
What's happening, it might take a few seconds, you see those little colors, those little circles change from zero to green.
Now that they're in green, they are actually in those breakout rooms.
Let me just move this dialog here for a second. You can see on the right-hand side of my screen where the participants are, I'm the only one left here in the main room, no one else here is with me.
They are all here within these rooms.
So essentially what it does is it actually sort of creates separate Zoom meeting rooms. They're gonna see essentially what you and I see right here as they have their small discussion.
Now as the host, what I can do is I can join them,
How to Join a Breakout Room as a Host
Here you can see this little Join button here beside these rooms.
Let's join the Blue group here for fun. I'm going to select Join, confirm, Yes.
We're going to get a little message here, it might take just a few seconds, and essentially what you're gonna see here, it's gonna pop open, and you're not gonna see anything too special, actually, because it's just another Zoom meeting room.
Now it's myself and these two participants within this room, so I can check in, how are things going, do you have any other follow-up questions? What else do you need from me?
If I want to leave this room, remember, we can always select, let me close that for a second, always come back down here and select Breakout Rooms.
And I can see what's going on elsewhere. I can say, you know what, let's check in with the other group here. I'm going to say Join this one, which is obviously going to automatically remove me from the room that I was just in.
It might take a few seconds and here we are again. If I open up my participants now, I'm with the other group, I can check in and see how they are doing.
Now I'm going to leave this one here. I'm going to leave this group and go back to the main session, there's the notification telling me where I'm going with all this transitioning.
Let me open this up again, just open up manage my participant list, just so you can see that it's only me here at this point.
Now one thing I want to point out here
How to Send a Message to Breakout Rooms
Is let's say that you want to send a message to the groups, you want to give them an additional question, or you want to tell them to please wrap up in the next five minutes.
What you don't want to do is select Chat here from the main session room. Because if I type something in here, if I say, hi everyone, I might think that I'm talking to everyone but I'm only talking to everyone here in the Participants list, which in this point in time is just me, it's only me.
So don't think that you're speaking to those groups if you use the chat window here.
What we want to do is open up that Breakout Rooms dialog once again, and you can see down below that there is a Broadcast a message to all. This is what you want to select if you want to say something.
So here I can say wrap things up in the next five minutes, please.
Okay, so now I can broadcast that out. Now those other rooms, all of the participants are going to receive that message, maybe I want to send a message, does anybody need any help or something along those lines, and they can raise their hands.
I can't really mimic that for you here in real-time. But if these were real individuals, they could raise their hands and let me know
How to Close All Breakout Rooms
And actually send me a message back as well if I need to jump in and if I want to join them.
Last but not least, let's say that time is up, it's time to close all our rooms. I'm going to select this red button here.
And what's happening here is you can see that that 30-second timer has now started, they are still in the rooms as we speak, none of them, as you can see, have joined me yet.
They can manually say at this point, okay, we're done here, let's go back to the main room, they can jump in a little bit early if they want.
But if not, now we're down to about 10 seconds, what's going to happen is that when we get down to zero, they are automatically going to come back into this room.
So let's watch and see how this happens. Again, it might take just a few seconds here, Alex, Jane, Monica, Ted, they're all back, great. They're all back.
And the great thing about using breakout rooms here in Zoom is that everything that we've done here from the names of the rooms, from the pairings, it stays the same.
So if we want to come back and have some more discussion with all of the participants, we can go back into those same groups if we want to.
Well, I hope that you found today's video helpful, and I'd love to hear from you next, what other questions do you have about Zoom meetings? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
Thank you so much for watching. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
