Overview
Breakout Rooms is a Microsoft Teams feature that allows organizers to divide participants into smaller groups. Breakout Rooms are used to create small groups for discussions, group work, peer editing.
Before you begin...
You should know that only the meeting organizer can start a breakout room using the desktop client only. Participants can join a breakout room from desktop, web, or mobile.
For the best experience, we recommend that you have the Teams Application installed on your device and make sure you have the most up to date version of Teams. If you need to install Teams you can visit microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app and download and install it. If you already have the Teams App you can check if you have the most up to date version by checking the app store on the mobile device or by selecting your Initials or Profile picture on the top right and select the "Check for Updates" button. Instructions can be found here
Instructions
Break out rooms are created by the meeting organizer and they are controlled by the organizer. There is an option for the organizer to automatically create the groups or manually assign.
- Once the instructor has created the breakout rooms they should announce they are going to start the rooms.
- Once the start breakout rooms button has been selected by the meeting organizer you can select the Join Room button at the bottom or you can wait and automatically be moved into the room. This is just like any other meeting room
- If the meeting organizer enables you to return to the Main Meeting in the room settings you can go back by selecting the return button and go back to the main meeting.
- If the instructor will need to get the attention of all rooms they can make an announcement and it will show up in the chat field
- If you are unable to join a room the meeting organizer will receive an error message but you will not. To fix this make sure you have the most up to date version of MS Teams by following the instructions at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/update-microsoft-teams-535a8e4b-45f0-4f6c-8b3d-91bca7a51db1?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
Result
Following these instructions, you should be able to work with any breakout room.