Zoom breakout rooms are among the most popular features in Zoom Meetings and Webinars. Offering companies the opportunity to break groups into smaller segments, breakout rooms are great for training sessions, strengthening team relationships, and inspiring creativity.
In Zoom meetings, companies can use breakout rooms to split their conversations into as many as 50 sessions. Plus, meeting hosts and co-hosts can retain complete control over segmenting users. You can divide people into sessions automatically or manually or even allow participants to choose which sessions they want to join.
Anyone with a Zoom account can participate in a breakout room for free. However, it’s essential you know how to enable, create, and manage these rooms effectively. Here’s everything you need to know about using Zoom meeting breakout rooms.
Enabling Breakout Rooms in Zoom: The First Step
Zoom breakout rooms are available to every user on every plan. They come with complete access to video, audio, and screen-sharing capabilities. Plus, Zoom’s rooms are pretty extensive. You can create up to 50 sessions and have up to 200 participants in each room.
However, before you can use Zoom’s breakout features in your meetings, you will need to ensure they’re enabled. To do this, sign into the Zoom web portal as an administrator. You’ll need an account with permission to edit account settings.
You can choose whether you want to enable breakout rooms for everyone in your organization, specific groups of users, or individuals. If you’re just enabling breakout rooms for personal use, click “Settings” in the Zoom web portal, followed by the “Meetings” tab. Under “In Meeting (Advanced),” toggle the option for “Breakout Rooms” on.
Enabling Zoom Breakout Rooms for Groups
To enable breakout rooms for all members of a specific group, sign into the Zoom web portal as an administrator, and click “User Management.” Select “Groups” and pick the applicable group name from the list that appears. Next, go to the “Meeting” section.
Under “In Meeting (Advanced),” switch the “Breakout Rooms” option on. Click “Enable” to verify the update if a verification box appears. You’ll also be able to select checkboxes for the following options on Zoom:
- Allow hosts to assign participants to rooms in advance
- Allow message broadcasts from hosts
- Allow voice broadcasts from hosts
- Allow hosts to delete, rename, and create breakout rooms
- Allow insights into participant activity status in breakout rooms
Enabling Zoom Breakout Rooms for Everyone
Administrators with privileges to edit account settings can also enable breakout rooms for everyone at once. To do this, sign into the Zoom web portal, and click “Account Management” followed by “Account Settings.” Click on the “Meeting” tab, and scroll to “In Meeting (Advanced).”
Switch the “Breakout Rooms” option on. Users can also check optional settings like those available for Group breakout rooms.
To prevent users in your account from changing Zoom breakout room settings, click the “lock” icon to confirm the setting.
How to Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom Before a Meeting
Once breakout rooms are enabled on Zoom, users can schedule them in advance or access them during a meeting. To permit hosts to plan and assign breakout rooms before a meeting, you’ll need to click the checkbox next to this option when enabling breakout rooms.
If the option is enabled, meeting hosts can pre-arrange meeting participants into rooms when scheduling the meeting. Hosts can pre-assign up to 1000 participants and 100 rooms.
To pre-assign users to breakout rooms, sign into the Zoom web portal, then click “Meetings” in the navigation settings. Click “Schedule a meeting,” then in “Options,” select the “Breakout Room pre-assign” box, followed by “Create Rooms.” Click the “+” button in the window to add new rooms.
In the “Add participants” box, search for internal participants by name or email address, or add email addresses manually. You can also click and drag a participant’s email address from one room into another or use a CSV file to upload participant details.
You can save breakout room assignments for later use if you’re hosting recurring meetings. There’s also a handy option on Zoom to create breakout rooms based on the results of a poll.
How to Make Breakout Rooms in Zoom Meetings
If you want to create a Zoom breakout room during a meeting, that’s easy too. Start an instant or scheduled meeting on Zoom, and click the “Breakout Rooms” icon. It looks like a square divided into four segments.
Decide how many meeting rooms you want to make and how you want to assign participants to each room. There are a few options here:
- Automatically assign: Let Zoom automatically split participants evenly into each room.
- Manually assign: Choose which participants you want to include in each room.
- Let participants choose: Give participants the option to choose which rooms to enter
- Load pre-assigned rooms: Load previous room assignments on Zoom
Configuring Breakout Room Options
Click “Create,” Zoom will build your breakout rooms, but they won’t start automatically. You can manage your rooms before starting them with the “Options” window. This window allows users to check any options they want to include for breakout rooms, such as:
- Choose rooms: Allow participants to enter rooms independently after launch.
- Main session: Give participants the freedom to move back to the main room whenever they want. If this is disabled, the host or co-host must end the breakout rooms first.
- Move automatically: Automatically move all participants into their assigned breakout rooms when the rooms launch. You can also transfer all selected participants in a breakout room back into a meeting room when the breakout room closes.
- Auto close breakout room: Automatically end the breakout room after a defined number of minutes. You can also receive a notification when the time is up.
- Set countdown timer: Show participants how much time they have left in a breakout room before they’ll be returned to the main room.
After configuring all your options, click “Open All Rooms” to launch the breakout session.
How to Do Zoom Breakout Rooms: Preparation
Preparing Zoom breakout rooms for action is straightforward enough. By default, hosts and co-hosts are the only users allowed to assign participants to rooms. However, you can allow participants to give themselves to the rooms they want to use.
Once you assign participants to a room, you can also rearrange participants during meetings. Zoom offers various options, including:
- Move to Select a room to move a participant to.
- Exchange: Swap a participant in one room with an attendee in another.
- Delete: Remove a selected breakout room.
- Recreate: Recreate all previous rooms. You can also recreate breakout rooms with the same assignment arrangements as the ones you used previously.
- Add: Create a new breakout room.
- Open all rooms: Start all breakout rooms.
Managing Zoom Breakout Rooms in Progress
Once your breakout rooms are running on Zoom, all participants will either be automatically moved into their assigned rooms or asked to join a breakout session. The host or co-host that launches the session will stay in the central meeting until they choose to enter a session.
Zoom will launch a breakout room window, split into two tabs. Here, you’ll see all the open breakout rooms, active participants, and the total number of participants. You can search through participants based on whether they’ve joined or not joined a breakout session.
Within the breakout rooms window, you can also find options for:
- Rename: Change the name of a breakout room
- Join: Join a breakout room
- Leave: Return to the main meeting room
- Delete: Remove a specific meeting room
- Broadcast: Send a message or broadcast microphone audio to all rooms
- Add Room: Create a new breakout room
- Close all rooms: Stop all rooms after a 60-second countdown.
During a meeting, you can also save breakout room assignments for future use. Users can save up to 10 assignments by clicking the three-dot “…” button and selecting “Save Breakout Rooms.”
Participating in Zoom Breakout Rooms
To join a breakout room as a participant on Zoom, you’ll usually need an invitation. This invitation will appear on the Zoom client, allowing you to join immediately or later. If you choose “later,” you can access the breakout room by clicking the square icon in your meeting controls.
If the host allows participants to select which breakout room to join, you’ll see a list of rooms created by the host, and you can join or leave these freely. Click the Breakout Rooms icon to find a list of all the rooms available and the participants in each one.
To join one of the rooms, hover over the number to the right of the room you want to enter and click “Join.” You can return to the main session anytime by clicking “Leave Breakout Room.” When a host ends a session, Zoom will notify you that the breakout room is closing, allowing you to re-enter the main room instantly or in 60 seconds.
Helpful Features for Zoom Breakout Room Users
If your Zoom client is up-to-date, you should have access to various features when participating in a breakout room. The exact features you can access will vary depending on the options set by the host or co-host of the meeting.
Some of the capabilities you may be able to access include:
- Select a breakout room: If the host selects this option, users can choose their own breakout rooms and move freely between them.
- Broadcast content: Hosts can share screens and audio with all participants in every breakout room; however, this option isn’t available to all participants.
- Broadcast messages: If you need to share information with everyone in your breakout rooms at once, you can type a message or talk to all participants instantly as a host.
- In meeting chat: Users can leverage the chat function within your breakout room to message other participants and share content, links, and ideas.
- Ask the host for help: This feature allows users to contact the host and let them know if they need help with any issues in the breakout room.
- Search: Hosts can rapidly move a person from one room to another within Zoom. You can search by name to find a participant if you have more than seven people in a meeting.
- View participant status: If you want to see if participants are actively participating in a breakout session as a host, you can view their status in the breakout room list. This will show which participants are using audio and video, reactions, and sharing the screens.
Hosts can also choose to “hop into a room” at any time to answer questions and set a timer to let users know when the breakout session will end in advance.
Using Zoom Breakout Rooms
Zoom breakout rooms are a straightforward way for businesses to take team productivity to the next level in meetings. They’re ideal for brainstorming and design sessions, icebreakers, mentorship, and training sessions.
With the guidance above, you should have all the details you need to launch and use your own Zoom breakout rooms.
from UC Today https://ift.tt/0JRqgFG
0 Comments