Tips for Using Zoom Breakout Rooms (Demo Included)

are you using zoom breakout rooms for your meetings or your online workshops well if you aren't you might be missing out on a valuable tool that has multiple benefits so today i'm going to share why i love using zoom breakout rooms i will actually show you a demonstration of how you set them up and there might be some settings you didn't know about like being able to add a countdown timer or automatically close rooms or allow participants to choose their rooms there are a few of those and you are going to see those in today's video and i'm going to explain why you would want to use one so what are some of the reasons you would actually use a zoom meeting and if you are new and you have never met me before my name is kat and i help people to create professional and engaging online presentations and this is definitely one of them it is a major tool for engagement i love using them i try to incorporate them as much as i can and i'll share some of the considerations that i use when it comes to this so first and foremost why why would we use breakout rooms and the three main benefits that i'm going to focus on today is that it's a part of engaging in a call it also allows everyone in the call to directly apply what it is they're learning or talking about or thinking about next steps or taking action and then also it is a form of social connection which is something that is often missing in our online virtual environment so let's start with engagement when it comes to engagement if you know you've got a breakout room coming up in a meeting chances are you're going to be a little more attentive or paying attention to when you get that invite to go into the room it is harder to multitask and it really can keep you present the other thing is when you go in that room you're probably going to be expected to do something so people tend to pay a little bit more attention not always it's not perfect but they'll know that okay we're going to talk about this in the meeting so maybe i should be paying attention in this meeting so really it sets that expectation from the start that i need to be here and not on my phone checking email or walking away from my computer completely with my camera off this is the type of thing where i need to actually be present and the other is because there's a little bit of that needing to rely on one another let's say you're going to a breakout room in pairs you don't want to leave the other person hanging i have seen it happen but generally i think most of us know that if we're going to be in a breakout room that another person is counting on us to actually show up and participate with them so that's the engagement piece so now let's think about applying knowledge and when i say this maybe it's a situation where you are teaching a new concept and you want people to actually apply that information and put it into practice okay i've learned this so now what do i do with this information for example when i run four tendencies workshops i teach about the four different tendencies and how you might communicate differently with a person of a different tendency than your own so then i want people to go into a breakout room in small groups and to actually discuss now that we know this now that we know our tendency how do we communicate differently with people so that we get a little bit more out of them or that we can have a more effective relationship with that person so it allows them to take that information right away and then apply it and that's really powerful the other thing is maybe you're using this for a meeting and you want people to discuss okay now that we've discussed this or you have this update what are we going to do about it or you can even break people into groups and each group can discuss a different component there are a lot of different ways that you can use this but what it does is gets people on there just on this topic right away and they can kind of get their hands dirty and start working on that subject right in the moment so that as soon as you learn it you can actually take action and figure out what's next now finally social connection i remember about 12 years ago i took a course on e-learning in the 21st century this is before it was as common as before or as it is now and one of the things that really really stood out and i have never forgotten is that when it comes to an educational environment there are sort of three things that have to be there one is the content what you're actually learning another is the instruction or the instructor the person who's delivering that information but the third component is a social connection or that social environment now when you are in a room together that's your social environment so you are already setting it just by sitting amongst other people when you translate into an online environment or a virtual teaching environment that's where it changes because that is not automatic and it needs to be built yes you might still have content and yes you might have an instructor but you don't always have that social connection and i have a feeling that most of us have been in a situation where we felt zero connection and it really does diminish the quality so when you can be split into these small groups you can have these conversations and it does give you the opportunity to feel like you are engaged with another person on that smaller level now that we've shifted primarily to virtual contact and zoom meetings we are spending a lot of time in the meeting but not necessarily those small moments before a meeting like sitting down to the person beside you and chatting before the meeting starts or taking a little break in the middle and having an opportunity to just talk about whatever you want those things can start to happen a little bit in your breakout rooms all right i'm going to show a demonstration of how you can use the actual breakout rooms so this is whether you have used them or not you will see examples of how we do this before you actually do your breakout room setup and division in the meeting you do need to make sure that you enable breakout rooms so go into your zoom settings online and just make sure that it is checked off before i show you this demonstration though i do want to share something so the full disclosure is i invited some friends who were kind enough to volunteer to be part of this demonstration only i didn't realize until after we were done our call just how much the little breakout room instruction box was directly covering my face or the faces of other people in the call and while that is not ideal you are still going to learn exactly how to run the rooms it's just that some of our faces might be blocked out for some of it and because my friends were kind enough to join me and i didn't want to call them all back i'm just going to leave it in so i just wanted to give you a heads up so let's see an actual example of how you set up and change the settings for the breakout rooms so i'm now going to put these participants into breakout rooms so i click on the menu that says breakout rooms now because i did a test there are already a couple of rooms but i'm going to choose recreate and you will have a few options you can select how many breakout rooms you would like to have and if you were to toggle this up or down you can see that zoom automatically does the math and tells you how many people are going to be in each room now in this case we have four people so i'm going to create two rooms the first example i will show you is to have zoom automatically do the decision making for you you can just assign automatically so i'm going to recreate these rooms all of the individuals have been put into two different rooms and then i click open all rooms so now every single participant has received an invitation to join a room and then they will hit that button and then join the room and you will see that each time they accept then they are being pulled out of the main room and then by the end of it you will be the only one left in the room one of the things that i want to show you is that all of these people are in this room and we can actually send a message so if i wanted to say you have one minute left i could just put that in here and then send the broadcast and it'll show up at the top of everyone's breakout room but for now i am going to close all the rooms and invite everyone back when you close the rooms they will have 60 seconds to come back into the room and they will see a countdown sort of like you are seeing on the screen here but it does give them the option to come back in the room early so once you start to close the rooms then you can actually do that so now you everyone is back so let's do another version so we are going to recreate the rooms and this time i'm going to assign them manually so maybe i know i want to put some people together so in this case to in order to assign you simply click the assign button and then check who you want to go in a room for example if i want to put the first two people together and then i go to the next room and i put the last two people together and then i'm going to open all of the rooms again so they'll be invited again this time though i have decided who's going to be paired together this can be really helpful if you want to make sure that you are putting people together whether that is by position or what you'd like them to talk about for example when i am working on say the enneagram i'll often put similar types together now i'm going to close all the rooms and show you another example because you can actually have the option to have people choose their own room which is actually a really helpful tool if maybe you want to have people have the option perhaps you have a couple of different themes to your rooms this is a really great way to do that so if i say recreate and let participants choose their rooms then i'm going to create those and i can actually rename them before i let them choose the room so let's say that the first room is intros this is for people to maybe go and introduce themselves maybe they don't know everyone on the call and then maybe the second room is actually just a tech check so at the start of a call if someone's not sure if their microphone is working they can pop into the check check room and maybe myself or having someone else who's helping with the workshop could actually be in that room so let's open these rooms and we will see what everyone decides are they going to go into the intro room or maybe they're going to go in the tech check room you could also have additional rooms and maybe have certain moderators or people who are in those rooms already now i want to point out that when this is happening you as the host are able to actually see where they go and because these participants have the option to choose a room and then enter that room you will also see that they have the option to switch rooms so if they wanted to they could choose to go into maybe they've got the tech check and that's done instead of coming back to the main room they could actually go to another and maybe if someone's having trouble you can actually assign them so if jeff's not able to select a room i could actually say assign to tech check and then he will now get an invitation to go into the tech check room because this is something we have learned is that maybe someone actually when it comes to choosing the rooms it might not happen automatically and while they're in there they could move around now if you wanted to jump into a room maybe you have everyone assigned and you say i'm going to be in the tech check room you can go over here on the right and when you click on join it will give you the option to jump into that breakout room so then it will take you into that breakout room as well now i'm going to close all the rooms and bring everyone back and i want to show you another thing that you can do so you can actually play around with the settings so when everyone is in the room and all the rooms are finally closed you can actually play around with the settings so on your breakout rooms if you open this little widget you will actually see different options so right now at the top i actually allow participants to choose room checked which means even if i assign participants to a room say room one and two they would actually be able to leave the one breakout room and enter the other so if you don't want people to bounce between rooms you would want to make sure you uncheck that the other thing is you can decide do you want to allow a participant to come back to the main room at any time maybe if they need to ask for help or get in touch with someone but let's say you actually have to step away and you are not going to be in the main room or you just simply want to make sure they are staying in their breakout rooms to do the exercise you can have this unchecked and you can also have automatically move all assigned participants into the breakout room so that once you assign them they actually don't have to click accept it will just shoot them into the room so it can save some time now the problem with this option or what you have to be cautious of is that if you put everyone automatically into a breakout room if someone has stepped away from their computer maybe you've put everyone in pairs you have one person and another person who's not actually there they are technically put in that room but if they're not present you have a person who's stuck on their own and you as a host won't know but if you invite people to join a breakout room if someone's sitting in a room alone and someone else hasn't accepted their invite you will know as a host maybe you can switch that around i've had to do that in some workshops where a person was not at their computer so i had to change the room around so that's something you should keep in mind now another thing is that you can set a timer and this is actually newer to me but let's say that you want this room to be two minutes long this is a really quick example maybe you would have five minutes or ten minutes whatever you decide you can actually enter the time for that breakout room and then you can also toggle the countdown timer so maybe i actually only want 15 seconds of a countdown timer you can adjust that so let's give that a try and i'm also going to show you automatically moving all assigned participants because i know they're all here and paying attention so let's do this i'm going to recreate i'm going to assign automatically let zoom do it and create these rooms so what will happen is that when i open these rooms everyone should be moved over but now you'll actually see that there is a breakout room countdown timer so right now you can see i'm seeing this but everyone in the room is also seeing it so i am going to jump into a room and show you so if i join room one okay so i have joined this breakout room and if you look at the top you will see that there is a countdown directly in that breakout room which means that everyone in this breakout room can see exactly how much time is still left for their breakout there are advantages to this you don't have to send a broadcast everyone knows how much time however this also means that some people might react to be watching the clock and not doing the actual exercise you asked of them so you have to weigh the pros and cons maybe test that out with the group so i'm going to leave this room and go back to the main meeting so now i am back in the main room and there are only 11 seconds left to this this countdown of this breakout room and so everyone is actually going to the rooms will automatically close but i'll actually get an option so i'm going to show you this when you are the host it will say the time is now up do you want to close them or keep them open so if i say close now then they will get the warning that the room is going to close they'll see the countdown timer but the other thing if you keep those rooms open longer you will just see the countdown at zero so it's not going to restart a countdown if you decide you want to keep those rooms open a little bit longer so maybe if someone's asking for help or you realize they need a little bit more time you do have that option you are not completely stuck with that time that you predetermined at the start and when you go to this just make sure that you are opening your settings and making sure that they are the right ones at the start of the meeting especially if you've changed them you'll want to go back and just always give them a little check before you do this but those are some of the benefits of having the breakout rooms and that is actually how you do it so now you have seen exactly how a breakout room works how you can manage the different settings and some of the things you want to think about so now there are a few other considerations that i would like to point out when it comes to using breakout rooms for your meeting or for your presentation or for your workshop the first is do these people in the meeting know one another now it doesn't they don't have to know each other but i would say breakout rooms you can rely on them a bit more when you know that the group has some familiarity maybe they work together maybe they're the same organization or same membership or association but there are still times when even if the people on the call don't know each other those breakout rooms are a great tool but you just want to think about the relationship that they have with one another and it should be clear up front for example i have joined workshops where i've known no one else who was attending and i knew it was an interactive workshop and that i would be in small breakout rooms with people i don't know and even though i'm a facilitator and i love people i still get nervous about putting being put into a breakout room and not knowing anyone so having that expectation set out in advance letting people know is always a good idea and what is their relationship to one another so if you are going to be putting people into rooms and maybe there is a direct reporting relationship or maybe there is some tension between people in the group that you are aware of you might want to take that into consideration when you are putting the groups together and that's where i would recommend you use a manual assignment where you choose who goes in the room versus letting zoom do it for you that way you can just make sure that you are taking care of any of those relationships and interpersonal conflicts that might arrive because that's a possible thing the other thing what's the purpose that it serves nobody wants you to waste their time and yes there's going to be engagement with breakout rooms there's that social connection they can start to apply knowledge but what's the knowledge they're applying what is the thing they're going to do you don't want to slap them in a room and hope something happens you need to be intentional so i want you to think about the actual purpose of using the breakout rooms before you actually use them and the last thing that i want to say is that there is an ability for you to pre-assign rooms you can have a spreadsheet ready and zoom actually has a template that you can fill out where you have the room and then you have the people in the room the only caveat is that every single person has to have a zoom account so you have to know the exact email that that individual uses with their zoom account so personally i have not used the pre-assignment but if you want to learn more about that you can go onto the zoom website and as always if you found this video helpful i encourage you to like the video and subscribe so you can always be up to date when there is new content that will help you to create more professional and engaging online presentations

Channel: Cat Mulvihill

Views: 40,851

Rating: 4.9436007 out of 5

Keywords: tips for using zoom breakout rooms, zoom breakout rooms tutorial, zoom breakout rooms, zoom breakout rooms manually, zoom breakout rooms participants choose, zoom breakout room timer, virtual workshop best practices, virtual workshop facilitation, virtual workshop tools, virtual workshop tips, online workshop zoom, online workshop tips

Id: 2P1ETlamcl4

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021