How to Schedule Breakout Rooms in Google Meet

Say you’re holding a virtual class in Google Meet and you want to let your students split off into discussion groups to go over the lesson so far—Google Meet’s Breakout Rooms let you temporarily divide your virtual meeting into smaller groups, and do so with minimal fuss. You can create breakout rooms at any time before or during a call, but there are some limitations.

Only the meeting’s moderator can create and control breakout rooms, and only on desktop—though participants on mobile can still join breakout rooms once the moderator turns them on. You also cannot record or livestream a 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. Host a new meeting in Google Meet.
2. Click the “Activities” button in the upper-right, then select “Breakout rooms.”
3. Select how many breakout rooms to create (up to 100).
4. Google Meet will automatically sort the participants into the rooms, or you can manually create each group by typing a participant’s name or dragging their icon into the room.
5. Click “Open Rooms” to switch over to breakout rooms.

The meeting’s moderators can remove participants, edit break room details, or add timers using the in-call controls.

To end breakout rooms:

1. Click “Close Rooms” to End all breakout rooms.
2. Confirm you’re ready to end the breakout sessions. All rooms will close in 30 seconds, and participants will be returned to the main meeting.

Create breakout rooms in Google Calendar

Some workspace users can also set up breakout rooms ahead of time through Google Calendar.

(Note: This feature is not available to 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 the meeting’s participants.
4. Next, click “Change conference settings.”
5. Select “Breakout rooms” from the left-hand menu.
6. Choose the number of breakout rooms, then add participants. You can drag-and-drop, type in the names, or click “Shuffle” to randomly mix the groups into rooms.
7. Click “Save” to wrap up.
8. You can enable your pre-made breakout rooms at any time once the meeting has started in Google Meet.

You can also add breakout rooms to an existing meeting in Google Calendar. Open the event, then click “Edit event.” Go to Event Details > Change conference settings > Breakout rooms.

[9to5Google]