 Hi, this is Russell Standout from teachertrainingvideos.com. Loads of you are asking me about breakout rooms, so what I've done is a complete A to Z of breakout rooms. If you follow this video right through to the end, I'm gonna give you loads of tips on using breakout rooms, including why it's so important to make sure that you've got the screen share set for everyone, how you can reassign people to breakout rooms, how you actually create the rooms in the first place, how you join a room and listen to what's going on, but then leave. I'm gonna go through absolutely everything. This is the A to Z of breakout rooms when working with Zoom. Hope the video was useful. If it is, please like it, please share it. That would be great. Teachers really need this stuff at the moment. Please, any comments, leave them below. And if you wanna join me, come over to teachertrainingvideos.com, sign up to the newsletter and maybe join me on my YouTube channel as well. Let's get started. When you work with breakout rooms, and because you're probably gonna be using them most of the time, it's a good idea in your general settings to set up your breakout room so that every time you schedule a meeting, you've always got a breakout room in that meeting. And to do that, just come onto your system, go onto meetings, come down to settings, and the setting you wanna set, if you come down here is, you've got here meetings, recordings, telephone, just scroll down and you should see, as you scroll down here and it's quite a long way down, it's actually the first setting in the advanced part, okay? Come to here and turn breakout meetings on. And that means every time you have a breakout meeting, then that will be activated. Now, that is really the only thing that you need to worry about at the moment. The other important setting you can do when the meeting starts. If you click now and schedule a meeting, and we're just gonna start a meeting straight away, so we're gonna come into the meeting, start it off. You'll notice that the breakout room, okay, so you can see me on the screen now. I'm gonna turn my camera off while I do this, so I'm just gonna click there to turn off the camera and we need to get into breakout rooms. Now, the first thing about the breakout rooms is this. Come to the breakout room, click here. In the minute, I'm gonna take you for a live one, but basically it's gonna tell you how many participants you've got in the room. So let's say as an example, you've got 20. It's gonna say assign 20 participants into and you're gonna decide how many rooms. So I'm gonna do five rooms, there's gonna be 20 participants and that will be four people in each room. And I normally click on automatically. Now, when you click on the create rooms button, okay, it doesn't mean to say that actually the rooms will start. You need to click on open all rooms. And what you will see here, and you'll see in a live session in a minute that I'm gonna show you, is that all of the students will be listed here and you will clearly see who is in which room. Remember, you've set it automatically. And so it makes it really, really easy. You simply just click on automatic and the students are immediately put into their rooms. Now it is possible to move students out of rooms as well, but automatically they will be now in their rooms. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you this live. So you can see me in a live session here and I've got 19 participants and I'm gonna divide them into five different groups. I'm doing it automatically. I click on the button and look what happens. They're all automatically placed in their groups. I don't have to do anything there. I just clicked on automatic and all of the teachers were immediately put into their groups. Now all I need to click on that button there, open all rooms. As soon as I do that, they will be placed in their rooms. Okay, before I move on and actually show you what it's like when I click on the button and move all the people into their rooms, I just wanna go through a couple of settings that are really important. When you create the breakout rooms, if you come here and click on it, one thing you've got is some options and some of these options are really important. First of all, if you always wanna put your students automatically into breakout rooms, then choose that option. Sometimes I wanna do it manually. So for that reason, I don't choose that option. Allow participants to return to the main session at any time, that's a really important choice. With adults, I always have that on because I really don't wanna force adults to stay in their breakout rooms. So if they wanna leave and come back to the main room, they can click on a button at any time they can leave. If I'm working with young learners, I may turn that off so that they have to stay in the breakout rooms until I close the breakout room. So really important button. This next one is also important if you decide that you wanna limit the amount of time. I don't generally use that, but you can have it that a breakout room is automatically closed after a certain amount of time. That can be good, for example, if you're in the lesson and you wanna control how long the students are actually working in a breakout room. This last setting is super important. When you close a breakout room and bring everyone back to the main room, it's very rude if you click on a button and suddenly you just leave the room. So there's a counter that will kind of warn the people that they're gonna be leaving the breakout room. And what you can do is maybe give them 60 seconds is often too long, about 30 or 15 seconds, so that when you say close breakout rooms, there's kind of 15 seconds to finish off the discussion and then come back into the breakout room. 30 seconds might be more appropriate. So I would recommend that you always set that. So those settings, those options are really, really important. Right, let's get back now and actually move into our rooms and see how it all works. So now you can see I'm gonna click on the open all rooms tab and immediately you can see now that the students have all been moved into their rooms. And if I wanna send them a message and then I can just simply click on broadcast a message to all and that message will go out to all of the different groups. A really important button is the join button. It works so well. You just simply click on join and suddenly you find yourself in that group. Remember, when your students are in their breakout groups, you are on your own in the main room. But you can at any time you want, just click on a join and you can go in, listen to the group, see them on the screen if they've got their webcams on and of course you can give them help and support, et cetera. Now I'm gonna join one of the rooms. I just click on breakout room one. So yes, and in I go. So now I find myself in the breakout room and it's just like being a member of the group. Nothing is any different at all. Now I can leave a breakout room at any time. When I join a breakout room, I'm just another member of that group. I can hear the discussions. I can engage in the discussions. If we're open on the webcam, I will be open on the webcam. But I can click on the breakout rooms at any time and just leave. And you can see me doing that now. I'm just clicking on the breakout room to leave it. At any time that I wanna close the rooms, I just press on the close all rooms and it will bring everyone back to the main room. Remember, it will depend on how long I set the timer for. Was it 15 seconds or 30 seconds, et cetera. One thing when your students are in breakout rooms, if you wanna move anyone, you just roll over their name and you'll see in a minute I'm gonna show you that you can just move them into another room and you can just choose the room you wanna move into them, click and they will move to that room. So that can be quite nice if you suddenly want to reorganize the groups and perhaps have one person from each group go into another group and report back what that, what the other group was saying. It can work really well or bring everyone back into the main room and just get them to share their discussions. But that can be a really nice way of working. Takes a bit of practice, but it is possible to start moving students around. And I was doing some testing the other day with the system and it works really well. Now I actually forgot to record this live, but you can see I just roll my cursor over. It says move to, I click on the move to button and the list of classes come up. I click on the class and the student will go straight into that class. Now there's a couple of surprising things about breakout rooms that teachers often don't think about, I must admit I made this mistake at the beginning. If you don't give the option to the students, the participants to share their screens, it will actually mean that when you go into the breakout room there's nothing in the center of the screen apart from of course the webcams. If you want your students for example to talk over a PowerPoint slide or talk about it or talk about a picture or talk about a video or whatever, you need to give your students the option to screen share so that when they're in their breakout rooms whatever you want them to share on the screen is available to all the people in that particular group. So when you come down to here, and that's one of the reasons why you'll see that you've got this screen share and go to advance screen share options and you will want to make sure that all participants can screen share so that when they move into their breakout rooms it's not just them talking using their webcams but they can actually open up a PowerPoint slide or open up a document or open up a video or whatever you want them, for example it could be an interactive whiteboard. So that button is crucial. My advice is to also make sure that you for you put here only host. So the only person that can intervene when someone else's screen sharing is the host, that's you but that all participants can share their screens and the only one participant at a time can do it. That is vital. I had this mistake several times at the beginning, of course the students went into the rooms they realized they couldn't share anything apart from just talking, there was no way of them opening up any documents or anything onto the screen. Now you can actually create breakout rooms manually. I don't do that, it takes longer, you'd have to move everybody in but one really useful thing is when you go to click on your breakout rooms and let's, we've got some breakout rooms here, if you click on recreate, it will reset all the breakout rooms and put people into different groups. So for example if you come back to the breakout rooms and you're gonna do another exercise using breakout rooms, rather than put everybody into the same breakout room, click on the recreate breakout rooms button and then click on the open all rooms. So you can recreate the groups each time you go to use the breakout room and that really can help you to make sure that the students are always working with different groups of students. Those are really useful tips and can make the breakout rooms way more engaging, particularly making sure that they can all screen share. Wow, that was a really long and complicated video to make if you saw all the editing on the screen, you'd be amazed how complicated that was. I hope that was useful. I've gone through breakout rooms, I've covered I think almost everything. If you're looking for more videos, come to teachertrainingvideos.com, you can click on the zoom section or the Ed model section or lots of other sections there. If you wanna follow my work, sign up to the newsletter, that way you keep up with all the latest videos and the webinars I run, et cetera. You can also sign up of course to the YouTube channel that's getting really popular now. I think it's up to around 14, 15,000 and if you wanna contact me, you can also contact me from my website and thank you very much.