How to Schedule Breakout Rooms in Google Meet

Let’s say you are teaching a virtual classroom in Google Meet and you want your students to split into discussion groups to take a lesson. Google Meet breakout rooms allow you to temporarily split your virtual meeting into smaller groups with a minimum of fuss. You can create breakout rooms anytime before or during a conversation, but there are some limitations.

Only the meeting moderator can create and manage breakout rooms, and only on desktops, although attendees on mobile devices can still join breakout rooms after the moderator turns them on. You also cannot record or live stream the breakout room.

Breakout Rooms are only available for: G Suite Business, Workspace Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus, and Google Workspace for Education Plus.

Create breakout rooms during a meeting

1. Arrange a new Google Meet meeting.
2. Click the Actions button in the upper right corner, then select Breakout Rooms.
3. Select how many breakout rooms you want to create (up to 100).
4. Google Meet will automatically sort the members by room, or you can manually create each group by entering a member’s name or dragging their icon into the room.
5. Click Open Rooms to switch to breakout rooms.

Meeting moderators can remove attendees, edit break room information, or add timers using controls during a conversation.

To close breakout rooms:

1. Click Close Rooms to close all breakout rooms .
2. Confirm that you are ready to conclude the breakout sessions. All rooms will close after 30 seconds and participants will return to the main meeting.

Create meeting rooms in Google Calendar

Some workspace users can also pre-configure breakout rooms using Google Calendar.

(Note: This feature is not available for G Suite Basic, Google Workspace Business Starter, or Google Workspace Education Fundamentals users.)

1. Go to calendar.google.com and create a new event.
2. Click Add Google Meet Video Conferencing.
3. Select meeting attendees.
4. Then click Change Conference Settings.
5. Select Breakout Rooms from the menu on the left.
6. Select the number of breakout rooms, then add participants. You can drag and drop, enter names, or click Shuffle to randomly combine groups into rooms.
7. Click “Save” to summarize.
8. You can enable pre-built breakout rooms any time after you start a Google Meet meeting.

You can also add breakout rooms to an existing Google Calendar meeting. Open the event and click “Change event”. Go to Event Information > Edit Conference Settings> Breakout Rooms .

[ 9to5Google ]

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