Breakout rooms can be useful to get students talking and working in small groups in a virtual class meeting. Here are directions for creating breakout rooms in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.
How to Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom
To create breakout rooms in Zoom you’ll first need to make a small change in your account settings. The change is to enable the breakout rooms option so that a “breakout rooms” button appears in your meeting controls during your meetings.
To enable breakout rooms in Zoom:
- Open your account settings.
- Select the “Meeting” tab.
- Select “In Meeting (Advanced).”
- Move the Breakout Room slider icon to the on position.
- Breakout rooms should now appear as an option in the meeting controls for every meeting you host.
How to Create Breakout Rooms in Microsoft Teams
This is a new feature in Microsoft Teams. To use the breakout rooms function you need to be using the latest version of Microsoft Teams (check with your IT admin if you’re not sure that you’re on the latest version). Then you can follow the detailed directions that Mike Tholfsen (product manager for Microsoft EDU) provides in this video.
How to Create Breakout Rooms in Google Meet
Google Meet offers a breakout room functionality only for those people who are using a paid version of Google Workspaces or G Suite for Education Enterprise Edition. If your school has the paid version, you can enable breakout rooms by clicking on the “activities” icon during a call. You can find more details about the feature here.
For those who are using the free version of Google Workspaces or G Suite for Education, there is a third-party Chrome extension for creating breakout rooms. The latest version addresses some of the problems with previous iterations. One thing to keep in mind when reading reviews of third-party extensions is that developers are often at the mercy of Google’s constantly evolving policies and programs. That means that sometimes an extension stops functioning correctly not because of something the developer did but because Google made a change that the developer hasn’t yet responded to.
