Zoom Breakout Rooms

By default, a Zoom session takes place entirely in the main room. If you want to split students into discussion groups, you can do so by creating breakout rooms. (NOTE: If you are recording your session to the cloud, Zoom will record the main room only.)

You can create the rooms ahead of time and pre assign students or you can create them on the fly after you have started a Zoom session. You must be the host of the meeting; co-hosts cannot create breakout rooms but they can jump between them. To start using them select the icon that looks like four squares (you may need to click the more button if your window is not full screen).

You can manually assign students to breakout rooms or let Zoom automatically divide them into the number of you groups you specify. In the latest version of the Zoom app you can give students the ability to choose a breakout room themselves. Once the rooms are created you can change some of the settings by clicking the options link. Some options you may want to change include setting a time limit for the rooms to be open, setting a countdown timer to warn people when the rooms will close and to automatically move people into their breakout rooms. Moving people automatically is a good option since it means you don’t have to wait for students to click a box before they join their room. Keep in mind that you cannot add more rooms after you create them without closing all the rooms and starting this process over. 

Once your rooms are assigned, be sure to open them for participants. Students will be prompted to click “Join” to enter their assigned rooms.

You can pre-assign the students to breakout rooms before the meeting starts. To do this you need to first enable the setting at http://trincoll.zoom.us. Click on Settings and scroll down and find the setting “Allow host to assign participants to breakout rooms when scheduling” and turn that on as shown below.

In the meeting settings choose Breakout Room pre-assign (NOTE You cannot do this via Moodle or the Zoom client app you must do this at http://trincoll.zoom.us.) Then you can create rooms and add people. To add people to the breakout rooms just search by name. In order for this to work they will need to be logged in using the account in the system. Unless all your students are logged in you will still have to manually add some to their proper room.

You can enter and exit the breakout rooms as you like while students are meeting in them. While a cloud recording will not include content from the breakout rooms, students can choose to create a local recording of their room.

When you’re finished using breakout rooms, be sure to close them to return your students to the main room. They can return immediately or be automatically returned after 60 seconds.