Not on Zoom? Here are tips on how to run Breakout Rooms on Meet and Teams!
Google has just launched its new “Meet Breakout Rooms” feature for G Suite Enterprise for Education customers. Those on other G Suite subscriptions will have to wait until later this year to enjoy it.
Zoom have had the Breakout Room feature for a while now while Microsoft Teams’ is still in development… But do not despair as there are workarounds for non-Zoom users.
Here is how you can manage breakout sessions on Google Meet and Microsoft Teams during virtual collaboration sessions. Do note that as with Google’ suite of apps, “Meet Breakout Rooms” works better on Google Chrome.
Meet Set-Up
Set up your Plenary Room for the duration of your session on Meet and invite all your participants.
Set up each Breakout Room on a separate Meet and invite only the group members to each breakout.
Your calendar will look like this, and your participants will only see the Breakout they will be joining.
How to keep tabs on all the meetings at once
You can choose to leave the Plenary Room while you’re in a Breakout Room. If you prefer to stay connected to each of the Rooms – to keep tabs on participants’ progress for example – here’s what you can do:
Join the rooms on Chrome , making sure you have one separate tab for each room.
Mute your mic in each room to avoid accidentally broadcasting to all rooms. It’s easier to unmute when you know you’re in the correct room to share your message with.
Unless you want to listen to the discussions in all rooms, mute your speaker on the rooms you don’t want to listen to at that point by right clicking on the room tab and clicking on Mute Site. You can do the same to unmute. So, before you click on another tab to go to another room, mute the room you’re leaving and unmute the room you’re joining.
On Microsoft Teams, if you use the webapp on your browser, you can follow the same suggestions than above. In addition, you can set up channels or chats of smaller groups in your General Team, to easily get the right people in the same room or call the right people in.
If you’d like to know more tips and tricks on how to conduct a successful virtual session, contact us or subscribe to our newsletter.