Managing breakout rooms in Teams

    Open your breakout rooms

    When you’re ready to open your breakout rooms:

    1. In the breakout room window, click Open rooms to open all rooms at once.
    2. You can open each room individually by clicking on the ellipsis (***) beside the room name and choosing Open rooms.

    Note that once students are in their breakout rooms, they have presenter permissions in that room. Tools such as promoting to presenter, screensharing, recording and removing others from that room is enabled for them.


    Assigning students to breakout rooms

    If you chose to assign students Automatically when creating the rooms, participants will already be assigned to different breakout rooms.

    To manually add participants to rooms:

    1. Expand the list under Assign participants.
    2. Hover over the student names until checkboxes appear. Choose students by selecting the checkboxes.
    3. Select More options button and choose a room from the list.
    4. Repeat this process until all students have been assigned to rooms.
    5. To view the participants assigned to a breakout room, expand the arrow next to the room's name.

    Students joining the rooms

    There are two ways for your participants to join the rooms once they're open. They can be automatically sent to breakout rooms, or they can be given the choice to join. To set these options

    1. Click on the ellipsis at the top of the breakout room window and choose Room settings

     2. If you want students to be forced to join a room, ensure the Automatically move people into opened rooms is ticked.
     3. To allow students to move between their breakout rooms and the main room, e.g. to ask a question, ensure the option Let people go back to the main meeting is ticked.

    Students will see a 10-second countdown banner prior to joining the breakout room.

    Move participants between breakout rooms

    You're able to move students between breakout rooms if required. However this is currently only possible when the breakout rooms are closed.

    1. In the breakout room window, expand the room information.
    2. Click the checkbox beside the name of the people you wish to move.
    3. Click Assign.
    4. Select the name of the room you wish to move the students to.

    Make an announcement in all breakout rooms

    The meeting organiser can send an announcement in the meeting chat to all breakout rooms. This is useful for announcing an approaching finish time, or prompting students of the further points for discussion. To make an announcement in all breakout rooms:

    1. In the breakout rooms window, click Make an announcement.

     2. Write your announcement in the box and press Send. The message will be sent to all breakout rooms and will appear in their chat windows.
     3. Announcements will show up as Important! in the room chat:

    Students can respond to the announcement and even @mention the organiser if needed.

    Joining breakout rooms as the organiser

    The organiser of the session is able to join any of the breakout rooms and move between them one at a time. To enter a breakout room:

    1. Click on the ellipsis beside the room name and select join room
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