Split your Zoom Meeting among 50 separate sessions and get participants
talking with Zoom’s Breakout Rooms feature. To get started, navigate to your Zoom web portal
and double-check that a few In-Meeting (Advanced) Settings are switched on.
First, allow Breakout Rooms. Second, you'll find some additional Breakout Room options.
Click the Breakout Rooms icon in your main toolbar and select the number of rooms you’d
like to create based on your group size and overall goals for the activity. From here,
you have three choices for how to form groups: Assign automatically - to let Zoom randomly
group participants in an even or near-even split across your chosen number of rooms.
Assign manually - to have the host or co-hosts choose groups for participants, or
Let participants choose their rooms. When this option is selected,
participants may also move in and out of Breakout Rooms after they’ve opened.
If you’ve chosen to assign automatically, you’ll also get a view of the participants
in each room, but you may move or exchange them if you’d like.
If you’ve chosen to assign rooms manually, you’ll select and assign
groups of participants from a list. Add, delete, and rename rooms
Click the Settings menu or gear icon in the bottom left corner of this window
to reveal even more options, including switching to allow participants to self-select rooms
or setting a time limit with a countdown clock. When you’re ready, click Open All Rooms.
If groups are already set, participants will see a pop-up asking them to Join their respective rooms.
Or, the host or co-host can choose to move them automatically, which will simply
notify participants that they’re being moved. If participants are allowed to choose their rooms,
they’ll see a pop-up with a list of all available rooms and the option to Join.
Once selected, participants will automatically arrive in a new virtual
meeting space with the rest of their group. This room functions just like the main room in
that participants can turn audio and video on or off, share screens, use Reactions,
In-Meeting Chat, and more as long as those settings are enabled in the main meeting.
Chats exchanged to Everyone in a Breakout Room are only shared with that group
(rather than all meeting participants) while the room is open.
There are a few ways hosts and co-hosts can support participants.
They can quickly Join and leave any open room.
Hosts may even see a notification requesting your help in a particular room. Participants
can click the Ask for Help icon to invite the host to visit for assistance.
Hosts and co-hosts can Broadcast a Message to All rooms providing
additional instruction and reminders. Or, they can share their screen to the main
session and all Breakout Rooms simultaneously. Click the Share Screen button from the main menu.
Select which desktop or application you’d like to share,
Then click the Share to Breakout Rooms box at the bottom of the options window.
Finally, if needed, hosts and co-hosts can also move or exchange participants between open rooms.
When you’re ready to conclude your breakout sessions, click Close all Rooms to notify
participants to rejoin the main session. If you set a time limit in the Additional
Settings menu we visited earlier, participants will see a timer inside Breakout Rooms,
and they will close automatically after the amount of time that you chose.
However, hosts will be given the option to override the automatic closing if they wish.
Once established during a meeting, you may send participants back to the same
or different Breakout Rooms at any time. If the meeting is recorded to the cloud, it will
only record the main room and not any Breakout Rooms, regardless of where the meeting host is.
If recording locally to your device, it will record inside the room of whoever
initiated the recording. If enabled and allowed by the host, multiple
participants can record from different rooms. Thanks for watching, and meet happy, Earthlings!