Tips for Using Zoom Breakout Rooms (Demo Included)

Are you

using

Zoom

breakout

rooms

for your online meetings or workshops? Well, if not, you may 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

. In fact, I will. I'll show you a

demo

of how to set them up and there may 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 them and you I'm going to look at them in today's video and I'm going to explain why you would want to use one, what are some of the reasons why you would actually use a Zoom meeting and if you're new and you've never met me before, my name is.

Kat and I help people create professional and engaging online presentations and this is definitely one of them. It is an important tool for participation. 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 why would we use break rooms in the first place? And the three main benefits that I'm going to focus on today is that it's part of participating in a call and it also allows everyone on the call to directly apply what they're learning or talking about or thinking about next steps or taking. measures and then it's also a form of social connection which is something that's often missing in our online virtual environment, so let's start with engagement when it comes to participation, if you know you have a breakout room coming up in a meeting, you're probably a little more attentive or paying attention when you get that invitation to come into the room, it's harder to multitask and "I can really keep you present, the other thing is when you walk into that room you're probably expected to do something." , so people tend to pay a little more attention, it's not always perfect, but they'll know, it's okay." I'm going to talk about this in the meeting, so maybe I should pay attention in this meeting, so really set that expectation from the beginning that I need to be here and not on my phone checking email or completely away from my computer with my camera off this is the kind of thing where I really need to be present and the other is because there is a little bit of that need to depend on each other, let's say you go to a break room in pairs and you don't want to leave the another person hanging up, I've seen it happen, but in general I think most of us know that if we're going to be in a breakout room, another person is counting on us to show up and participate with them, so that's the commitment.

So now let's think about applying the knowledge and when I say this maybe it's a situation where you're teaching a new concept and you want people to actually apply that information and put it into practice. Well, I already learned this. What do I do now? this information, for example, when I lead four tendencies workshops, I teach about the four different tendencies and how you can communicate differently with a person of a different tendency than you, then I want people to go to a break room in groups small ones and really discuss now that we know this now that we know our tendency, how do we communicate differently with people to get a little more out of them or that we can have a more effective relationship with that person to allow them to take that information? right away and then apply it and that's really powerful.

The other thing is that maybe you're using this for a meeting and you want to get people discussing. Well, now that we've discussed this or you have this update, what are we going to do about it? or you can even divide people into groups and each group can discuss a different component. There are a lot of different ways you can use this, but what it does is it gets people focused on this topic right away and you can get their opinion. dirty hands and start working on that topic right on the spot so that as soon as you learn it you can take action and find out what's next now finally social connection I remember about 12 years ago I took an e-learning course in the In the 21st century, This is before it was as common as it used to be or as it is now and one of the things that really stood out and that I have never forgotten is that when it comes to an educational environment there are three things that have to be one is the content, what you're actually learning, another is the instruction or the instructor, the person providing that information, but the third component is a social connection or that social environment.

Now, when you're in a room together, that's your social environment. They're already setting it up by just sitting among other people when it translates to an online environment or a virtual teaching environment, that's where it changes because that's not automatic and it needs to be built. Yes, you may still have content and yes, you may have an instructor. but you don't always have that social connection and I feel like most of us have been in a situation where we didn't feel any connection and that really diminishes the quality, so when you can break up into these small groups you can have these conversations and it gives you the opportunity to feel involved with another person on that smaller level now that we've moved mainly to virtual contact and

zoom

meetings, we spend a lot of time in the meeting, but not necessarily those small moments. before a meeting, like sitting down with the person next to you and chatting before the meeting starts or taking a little break in the middle and having a chance to talk about whatever you want, those things can start to happen a little in their work group rooms.

Well, I'm going to show a

demo

of how actual breakout rooms can be used, so whether you've used them or not, you'll see examples of how we do this before we actually set up and split up the breakout room in the meeting. . You need to make sure you enable breakout rooms, so go into your online

zoom

settings and make sure it's checked before I show you this demo, although I do want to share something so full disclosure is that I invited some friends that I had the chance to. I kindly volunteered to be part of this demonstration, but until we finished our call I didn't realize how much the small instruction box in the breakout room directly covered my face or the faces of others on the call, and While that's not ideal, you're still going to learn exactly how to run the rooms, it's just that some of our faces might be blocked during some parts and because my friends were kind enough to join me and I didn't want to call them all. back, I'll leave it at that, so I just wanted to let you know, so let's look at a real example of how to set up and change the settings of breakout rooms, so now I'm going to put these participants in breakout rooms, so I do 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'll have a few options you can select how many breakout rooms you'd like to have and if I toggle this up or down , you can see that Zoom does the calculations automatically and tells you how many people will be in each room.

Now in this case, we have four people, so I'm going to create two. rooms, the first example I'll show you is having Zoom automatically do the decision making for you, it can automatically assign them, so I'm going to recreate these rooms. All the people have been placed in two different rooms and then I click open all. rooms, so now each participant has received an invitation to join a room and then they will press that button and then they will join the room and you will see that every time they accept, they will be taken out of the main room and then at the end.

Of this you will be the only one left in the room. One of the things I want to show you is that all of these people are in this room and we can send a message, so if I wanted to tell you that you have one minute left. I could put that here and then send the broadcast and it will appear at the top of everyone's breakout room, but for now I'm going to close all the rooms and invite everyone back when you close the rooms, they'll have 60 seconds. to return to the room and they will see a countdown like the one you are seeing on the screen here, but it gives them the option to return to the room early, so once you start closing the rooms, you will be able to do that.

So now everyone is back so let's do another version so let's recreate the rooms and this time I'm going to assign them manually so maybe I know I want to get some people together so in this case to assign . you just click the assign button and then mark 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, I put the last two people together and then I'm going to open all the rooms again to be invited again this time, although I have decided who will be paired.

This can be very helpful if you want to make sure you bring people together, whether by position or what you'd like them to talk about, for example when I'm working on the enneagram. I will 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 useful tool, if maybe you want people to have the option, maybe have a couple of different themes for your rooms, this is a great way to do it, so if I say recreate and let the participants choose their rooms, then I'm going to create them and I can rename them before I let them choose the room, so let's say that the first room is the introductions, this is so that people 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 beginning of a call, if someone isn't sure if their microphone is working, they can go into the check room and maybe me or having someone else who is helping with the workshop could actually be in that room, so let's open up these rooms and see what everyone decides: will they go to the introduction room or maybe they will go to the technical verification room.

It could also have additional rooms and maybe. I have certain moderators or people who are already in those rooms. I want to point out that when this happens, you as the host can see where they are going 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 change rooms, so if they wanted they could choose to go in, maybe they have the technical verification and that is done, instead of going back to the main room, they could go to another one and maybe.

If someone is having trouble, you can assign them, so if Jeff can't select a room, he could say assign to tech check and then he'll get an invitation to go into the tech check room because this is something we've learned. maybe someone actually when it comes to choosing rooms it might not happen automatically and while they're there they could move now if you wanted to jump into a room maybe you have everyone assigned and you say I'm going to be there. the tech check room, you can go here to the right and when you click join, it will give you the option to jump to that breakout room and then it will take you to that breakout room as well.

Now I'm going to close everything. the rooms and bring everyone back and I want to show you another thing you can do so you can play with the settings, so that when everyone is in the room and all the rooms are finally closed, you can play with the settings. in your breakout rooms, if you open this little widget you will see different options, so right now at the top I allow participants to choose the checked room, which means that even if I assign participants to a room, let's say room one and two, they will actually be able to leave one group room and enter the other, so if you don't want people to jump between rooms, you'll need to make sure to uncheck that.

The other thing is that you can decide if you want to allow a participant return to the main room at any time, perhaps if they need to ask for help or contact someone, but let's say you actually have to get away and you're not going to be in the main room or you just want to make sure they stay. in your work rooms to do the exercise, you can have this unchecked and you can also automatically move all assigned participants to the work room so that once you assign them they don't have to click accept, it will just shoot them to the hall. so now you can save some time.

The problem with this option or what you need to be careful about is that if you automatically put everyone in a break room, if someone has walked away from their computer, maybe you've put everyone in pairs, you have one. person and another person who is not actually there are technically located in that room, but if they are not present, you have a person who is stuck alone and you as the host will not know it, but if you invite people to join abreakout room If someone is sitting alone in a room and someone else hasn't accepted their invitation, you'll know as the host, maybe you can change that.

I had to do that in some workshops where a person wasn't at their computer, so I had to do it. change the room, that's something to keep in mind now, another thing is that you can set a timer and this is actually new to me, but let's say you want this room to last two minutes, this is a very quick example, maybe Maybe you could have five minutes or ten minutes. Whatever you decide, you can enter the time for that break room and then you can also toggle the countdown timer, so maybe I just want 15 seconds of a countdown timer.

You can adjust it, so let's try it and I'll go too. to show you auto move all the assigned participants because I know everyone is here and paying attention so let's do this, I'm going to recreate, I'm going to auto assign, I'm going to let zoom do it and create these rooms, so what's going to happen is that When I open these rooms, everyone should move, but now you'll see that there's a countdown timer in the breakout room, so now you can see that I'm seeing this, but everyone in the room is also seeing it, so I'm going a Jump to a room and show them that if I join room one, okay, so I joined this breakout room and if you look at the top you'll see there's a countdown right in that breakout room, so Which means everyone in this breakout room can see exactly how much time is left until your breakup.

This has advantages. No need to send a broadcast. Everyone knows how long. However, this also means that some people might react by looking at the clock and not doing the actual exercise. You asked them so you have to weigh the pros and cons, maybe try it with the group, so I'll leave this room and go back to the main meeting, so now I'm back in the main room and there are only 11. Seconds left for this breakout room countdown, so everyone's going to go to the rooms and they're going to close automatically, but I'm actually going to have an option, so I'm going to show you this when you're the host and it's going to tell you it's time. .

Now up, do you want to close them or keep them open? So if I say close now, they'll get the warning that the room is going to close and they'll see the countdown timer, but the other thing is if you keep those rooms open longer. you'll only see the countdown at zero, so it won't reset the countdown if you decide you want to keep those rooms open a little longer, so maybe if someone is asking for help or realizes they need a little more time, yes it has it. option, you're not completely stuck at that time that you predetermined at the start and when you go to this one, just make sure you open your settings and make sure they're correct at the beginning of the meeting, especially if you've changed them, you'll want to go back and just review them a little bit before doing this, but those are some of the benefits of having breakout rooms and that's how you do it, so now you've seen exactly how a breakout room works. room works how you can manage the different settings and some of the things you want to think about, so now there are some 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 thing is whether these people in the meeting know each other.

It's not like that, they don't have to know each other, but I would say in breakout rooms you can trust them a little more when you know the group has some. familiarity maybe you work together maybe you're the same organization or the same membership or association, but there are still times where 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 in the relationship they have with each other and it should be clear from the beginning, for example, I joined workshops where I didn't know anyone else 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 myself in a breakout room and not knowing anyone, so having that expectation set beforehand and letting people know is always a good idea. . and what their relationship is to each other, so if you're going to put people in rooms and maybe there's a direct reporting relationship or maybe there's some tension between people in the group that you know, you might want to take that into account. . consideration when you're putting the groups together and that's where I would recommend using a manual assignment where you choose who comes into the room instead of letting Zoom do it for you.

That way, you can make sure you're taking care of any of those. relationships and interpersonal conflicts that could arise because that is one thing possible, the other thing, what is the purpose it serves, nobody wants you to waste their time and yes, there will be interaction with the work rooms, there is that social connection, they can start applying knowledge, but what is it? the knowledge that they are applying, what they are going to do, you don't want to slap them in a room and wait for something to happen, you have to be intentional, so I want you to think about the real purpose of using the escape. rooms before using them and the last thing I want to say is that there is the possibility of pre-assigning rooms.

You can have a spreadsheet ready and Zoom has a template you can fill out wherever you have the room. and then you have the people in the room, the only caveat is that each person must have a zoom account, so you need to know the exact email that person uses with their zoom account, so I personally haven't used the homework, but If you want to learn more about it, you can visit the Zoom website and as always, if you found this video useful, I encourage you to like and subscribe so that you can always be updated when there is new content to help you. to create more professional and engaging online presentations