- Using breakout rooms in Zoom meetings is a fantastic way to
engage your participants, especially if you are
doing any type of teaching or training. However, there's a good chance that you may want to
pre-assign your breakout rooms. So in today's video, I'm gonna show you
everything you need to know about how to pre-assign your participants within your Zoom meetings. Hello everyone, Scott
Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress. And let's start things off
with getting into our settings. You'll need to log into your Zoom account within a web browser. And we wanna click on Settings
on the left hand side. We're gonna scroll about
halfway down the page before we get to the header, which is labeled In Meeting Advanced. And then the second option
below says Breakout room. Now you probably already
have breakout room enabled, but we need to make sure that you also have this checkbox checked, allow hosts to assign
participants to breakout rooms when scheduling. This is a must. This is allowing us to
pre-assign those participants to those breakout rooms. With that check, we can now
go back to our Meetings area and schedule our meeting. I'm going to hit Schedule a Meeting. Let's just give this a
quick Test Breakout meeting, that sounds good. We can fill out our description
and time and so forth, but where I wanna pay our
attention is down below under Meeting Options. So here, we now have this option because we checked that
option in Settings, under Meeting Options, we can now say breakout room pre-assign. Now we've got two choices
here available to us. I'm going to show you both, but I'm also going to
show you my preference, the one that I think is much
easier for you to manage. So the first one here is to create rooms and a dialogue is going to pop up here. And all we need to do
here is start adding rooms by hitting this plus button. If I say plus, it's going
to say Breakout Room 1, Breakout Room 2, Breakout Room
3, however many that I need. And on the right hand side, I can start inputting
their email addresses. Now, here is a major warning, I want you to listen carefully. Pre-assignment of breakout
rooms is only going to work with participants who have a Zoom account. What I mean by that, it's not just that they can access Zoom, of course, anyone can
access your Zoom meetings by just sharing a link. But they must have an actual Zoom account, meaning that they can
actually come in here to the Zoom browser and actually log in with their
email address and password within their Zoom account. If they don't have an actual Zoom account, then they will not be
able to be pre-assigned. They do not need a paid version. I repeat, any Zoom account, just a basic free version is fine. But they have to have an email address and a password to login to Zoom. So here under create
rooms, as I said before, you can come in here,
start creating your rooms and start adding participants by adding their email addresses. However, this is a little tedious, right? And even creating just two rooms of 10 is going to take you an awful lot of time, as you type in each and
every email address. Even if you copy and
paste them one at a time, it's going to take an
awful lot of time as well. So that's why I recommend
we choose the second option, Import from CSV. We can either do it
here from this dialogue, or if I hit Cancel, we can also hit this option
here, Import from CSV. So that's going to bring
up this dialog window. And before you hit this
to actually upload a file, we wanna make sure that
we download the template. Now you're only gonna
have to do this once, because once you have the template, you can use it multiple times
and copy it, if you need to. So we're gonna hit Download here. What it's gonna do, it's
gonna download a CSV file, which is gonna open up in
your spreadsheet application. So for most of us, that's gonna be something
like Microsoft Excel, like you see here. Now the template is pretty simple, there's really only two columns, Pre-assign Room Name and Email Address. And within the template, they've just given us
a few simple examples, just so we know where to put things. We can immediately go and delete
this dummy data right away and start putting in our own. The one thing you wanna
be careful of though is do not touch the
two headers at the top, Pre-assign Room Name and Email Address. Don't relabel them, don't
change anything about them. This is what Zoom is gonna be looking for to make sure that that
pre-assignment works out properly. So here in this example, they've just got three rooms and they've got two people in each room. Of course you can delete this and put in anything you want, right? We can have a bunch of blue rooms, and green rooms, and yellow rooms. And then over here, we can
put in those email addresses. And again, chances are, you probably have all of your
participants' email addresses maybe already in a spreadsheet
or some other document. You can just copy and paste
them here into this spreadsheet. And you're practically ready to go. So now once you save this, now what we're gonna do is
upload this to our file here. Now I've already created one in advance, so I'm going to click
this Upload button here, and I'm going to go find mine
called Test Breakout List A. And here you can see I've
created something super simple. I've just got two rooms, the
Blue Group and the Red Group. And I've got two dummy email addresses that I'm gonna be using here. I'm gonna select open, and now we return to our breakout
room assignment dialogue, and you can see they're ready for me. I've got my Red Group here
and I've got my Blue Group. And the nice thing is if I
need to make a few adjustments, I can still do that here. I can still move people between rooms, I can add other participants here. I don't always have to go
back to that spreadsheet if I don't want to, I can do
some fine tuning at this stage. All you need to do is Save. Now we can see we've got
those two breakout rooms. We can hit Save and create that meeting. But let's jump into a
meeting that I'm already in, where I created a similar
type of breakout rooms. So here I'm in a meeting with
two other individuals here and we have not yet
started our breakout rooms. So down below, I'm going to hit More, if you don't see breakout rooms, depending on how much room you have here on your Zoom Control Panel. I'm gonna hit More, I'm gonna say breakout rooms. And here we can see it's
already pre-assigned. I just open up the breakout rooms, Chloe is in room 1 where
I wanted her to be, and Zoe is in room 2, this is perfect. Now I can just open up all rooms and start my breakout room session. Now here's another note
that you should be aware of is if people are late to your Zoom meeting and you've already started
the breakout rooms, they will not automatically
be assigned to those rooms. Even if they have a Zoom account, even if you put them in your spreadsheet, they will not appear here, and they will not automatically
go into those rooms. They will appear at the top of the screen, and then you can just manually assign them to the place where you want. But just remember, if anyone is late, if anyone arrives after you've
started the breakout rooms, they will not just jump in to those breakout rooms automatically. Now here's something else
that I wanna show you as you're dealing with breakout rooms, chances are you may want
to shuffle things up as a part of your training or as a part of your Zoom meeting. So let's say at one point I wanna swap Chloe and
Zoe within their rooms. I'm going to hit Exchange here and now you see Zoe is in
room 1 and Chloe is in room 2. But maybe somewhere later in the meeting, I want everyone to go back to
their original breakout rooms, the original ones that
I created in advance. Well, all I need to do is
come down here to Recreate, and we're going to choose this option, Recover two pre-assigned rooms. I'm going to select that. It's going to confirm if I want to do it, and I'm going to say Yes. And now you can see
Chloe is back in room 1, Zoe is back in room 2,
just like I identified or just like I set up in advance. Well, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on pre-assigning
participants to Zoom rooms. If you wanna learn even more about how to use breakout rooms, be sure to check out the
video in the bottom left. And if you wanna see all
of my Zoom meeting tips, be sure to check out the
playlist in the bottom right. Thank you so much for
watching today's video. And if you enjoyed it, give it a like and subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive
does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.
