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Breakout Rooms for Group Work
Start by reading this Zoom help page about breakout rooms. The short video gives a good overview
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/206476313-Managing-Breakout-Rooms
Assign Students to Breakout Rooms
You can easily assign students Automatically (randomly) or Manually to breakout rooms
To Assign Students to Breakout Rooms
- First select Breakout Rooms from your Zoom controller bar at the bottom of the Zoom panel
- Note: When you are sharing your screen Breakout Rooms is located under the “… More” tab of the controller bar
- You then have the option of assigning students automatically or manually
To Assign Students Automatically
- Click Automatically assign. You can change the number of rooms and thus the group size
To Assign Students Manually
- Click Manually assign. You will be presented with options for creating rooms and a list of student names available to be placed in rooms
You have a lot of control over your breakout rooms. As a host you can:
- Manually send students to breakout rooms
- Let students move on their own once you set up room assignments for them
- Move students from room to room
- Enter the rooms
- Broadcast messages to people in the rooms
Attendee Perspective
- Meeting participants will be invited to join breakout rooms by a screen prompt
- Once inside the rooms, students can talk, chat, and screen share without disturbing anyone else. You can’t hear what people are saying in the rooms unless you enter the rooms with them
- Students can leave breakout rooms on their own and they can ask you for help using a Help button in the room if you enable it
- Breakout rooms are not recorded unless someone who is allowed to record (co-host or host) is in the room and records
- Breakout rooms cannot be used from the Zoom mobile app
Additional Breakout Room Controls
You can return students to their breakout rooms. You can also change breakout rooms mid class, but you will have to do it manually (unless you want to do random assignments again), so this is something that you should coordinate with a helper or TA who you can make host for a while you give instructions to the class. Co-hosts cannot start breakout rooms or move students from one room to another. Also, it is critical that your helper TA not leave the Zoom classroom before you are done with the breakout rooms that he or she created because that will cause those rooms to disappear.
Experiment before you try this with a class!
Preassigned Breakout Rooms
In order to create preassigned breakout rooms in a Zoom Canvas class, two things need to be set up. First, be sure that breakout rooms are enabled for your specific class (done through Canvas) and second, edit the class in utexas.zoom.us so that preassigned Zoom breakout rooms are allowed.
- Create your class in Canvas in the normal way
- Next, edit it in utexas.zoom.us (not Canvas) and add the Breakout Room pre-assign option.
- The easiest way to do this is to upload a csv file with all of your students’ Zoom UT EID’s in it. This Zoom help article explains more about pre-assigning students to breakout rooms. It also contains a sample csv file. Download and edit the file provided. Save it without changing its file type and do not add any columns!
- Note: Students must be logged in to Zoom via Canvas for the account names work correctly for pre-assigned breakout rooms. If a few people are not logged in via Canvas, they can be manually added to breakout rooms, but encourage your students to log in to Zoom via Canvas to make things easier.
Recover Students to Pre-Assigned Breakout Rooms
If a meeting host has pre-assigned breakout rooms using a .csv file and the host clicks on the “Breakout Rooms” button prior to everyone joining the meeting, they will need to use the “Recover to pre-assigned rooms” feature to get students back into their pre-assigned rooms.
If this occurs, the host will need to:
- Click on the dropdown button “Recreate” that is in the bottom left corner of the “Breakout Rooms” pop-up window and then select “Recover to pre-assigned rooms”
- Now everyone who was pre-assigned to a breakout room will be assigned to their room
Late Student Addition to Breakout Rooms
If any student/participant joins a meeting after Breakout Rooms have been created you need to do the following to add them to a room:
- Click on “Add A Room” then assign the new student to the new breakout room
- Then move the student to the room that you want them in
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To learn more about using the Breakout Rooms feature please go here.
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Group presentations
- Multiple students can be on the mic (6-7 are usually fine) and one can share the presentation screen with the class. The others can talk and the presenter can advance the slides.
- Make presenters co-hosts (along with you) during their presentations so that they control the participant window and can handle raised hands and unmute other students to take questions.
- Insist that presenters be on mic and on camera.
- Students without cameras should at least be required to have a Zoom profile photo of themselves
- Encourage groups to use headsets or headphones with mics if possible.
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