Intro to Breakout Rooms
Just like in in-person sessions, breakout rooms are great for creating more intimacy and connection. You can pair people up, or break people into small groups for discussions or brainstorming groups. You can even hold Open Space-style conferences, where participants can freely move between breakout rooms on their own!
Once you get the hang of breakout rooms, you may find yourself using them all the time. 🙂
Be advised, though, that as with any tool, breakout rooms can be overused.
Case in point: my 10-year-old nephew wanted to send me and his three grandparents into breakout rooms to play games one morning, and he practically had a Zoom mutiny on his hands! Our sole purpose for logging into Zoom that day was to be with him, not to play computer games with other adults.
Make sure the purpose of your gathering drives your use of your tools, not the other way around.
Breakout Rooms Basics
To use Zoom breakout rooms, first you’ll create the breakout rooms, then you’ll open the rooms.
Creating the rooms doesn’t move anyone around yet — that will merely allow you to assign participants to rooms via a panel. It’s opening the rooms which is what will actually send your participants into them (“Beam me up, Scotty!”)
Zoom gives you the option of assigning your participants automatically (which means Zoom does the math for you to figure out how many rooms to create and how to divide your participants among them), or manually (which means you have to do the math yourself.
In between, even if you pick the automatic option, before you open the breakout rooms and beam people off, you always have the option of reassigning participants from one room to another, or exchanging two participants, via the Breakout Rooms panel.
You can also rename rooms, which comes in handy if you want your participants to be able to move between rooms on their own (an advanced activity I’ll get to later).
The lessons in this module cover everything in more detail.
Click here to see the official Zoom page on breakout rooms (opens in a new window)
