If you’ve ever been in a large Zoom meeting and suddenly found yourself in a smaller meeting with a few other participants, you’ve been in a breakout room. This powerful tool allows meeting organizers and educators to break large groups into smaller groups for team meetings or project work. It works with every device, even on thecheapest Chromebooks. But how can you create a breakout room in Zoom?
The process can be tricky if you don’t know where to look. Here’s how to create a breakout room in Zoom.
This guide was made using Zoom on a Windows 11 PC. The Mac version of Zoom is almost identical, although the Settings option is located under Preferences in the taskbar in the app.
How to activate breakout rooms in Zoom
You must be a meeting organizer to use breakout rooms. Attendees do not have access to this function. Before you break anyone out into their own meeting room, turn on the function. A good practice is to set this up before your meeting begins rather than in the middle of the meeting.
You’ll activate this from the browser and not from the app. Here’s how:
You’re now ready to use breakout rooms.
How to create breakout rooms in Zoom
you may customize a few of the features for your breakout rooms when you’re ready to launch them. For example, you can choose how many breakout rooms to host and assign each member or let Zoom assign them. Zoom tries to put the same number of people in each breakout room when you choose the automatic function. Any remaining people are lumped into the last room.
You can do this from the web app in a browser or from the Zoom app. Here’s how:
You can make last-minute changes to your breakout rooms before clickingOpen All Roomsby assigning people to a room or adding another room in this final menu. If everything looks good, people are launched into their breakout rooms when you clickOpen All Rooms.
How to manage breakout rooms after they launch
Most meeting organizers and educators will want to manage their breakout rooms. For example, you may want to visit each room to see how teams are progressing through the tasks you assigned. There’s also the off-chance that something could go wrong or someone shows up late.
Zoom allows for quite a bit of granular control over breakout rooms. For starters, you may customize how your breakout rooms behave before they launch. SelectOptionsfrom theOpen All Roomsmenu and adjust your settings.
Rename or delete a breakout room
To rename or delete a breakout room, follow these steps:
Join a breakout room already in progress
You can pop in and out of breakout rooms in progress. Here’s how:
Jump to another breakout room
You can jump from one breakout room to another to check on other teams when you’re already in a breakout room.
Leave a breakout room
you’re able to leave a breakout room and return to the main meeting by clicking theLeave Roombutton in the lower-right corner.
Broadcast to all breakout rooms
If you want to broadcast a message to everyone while they’re in their breakout rooms, use Zoom’s broadcast option. You can broadcast a text message or speak to them using your voice.
How to close all breakout rooms in Zoom
You don’t have to manually shut down the breakout rooms if you set a timer when you set them up. If you prefer to choose a time to close all the breakout rooms or need to close them earlier, you can do that.
Every member of all your breakout rooms is given a 60-second timer with a warning that the room is about to close. Everyone is put back into the main Zoom meeting when the timer runs out.
Become Zoom breakout rooms pro
Zoom makes breakout room setup and management easy. The two primary things to remember are to turn on breakout rooms from the settings menu on the web and that all options for breakout rooms are accessed through the Breakout Rooms icon on the app.
Zoom lacks some of the features found in other video meeting apps, likecompanion mode in Google Meet. Still, it’s one of the most used collaboration platforms. Now that you understand breakout rooms, you’re set to lead your team or class.
