If you want to create your Google Meet breakout rooms in advance there is a way to get this set up in no time!
Important! Breakout rooms in Google Meet are part for the Google Workspace for Education Teaching and learning upgrade, as well as Plus. For more information about these different editions of Google Workspace for education and some links to the pricing you can read my previous update blog post.
That being said, the upgrade is well worth it! Breakout room are incredibly helpful during lessons to support your students, enable differentiation, group work, brainstorming, pacing, additional context, extension activities and more!
Using breakout rooms in Google Meet
Starting breakout rooms is as easy as opening up your Meet and selecting the activities tab.
Next, select breakout room and set up the number of rooms, assign students and add a timer if wanted.
The only cumbersome thing here, is that this all takes time, and if you want to have a fast paced lesson, setting up the breakout room ahead of time can be incredibly useful. In comes, Google Calendar.
Schedule your breakout room ahead of time
Google Calendar already enables us to create Google Meet breakout rooms in advance when we schedule a Meet. Create a new Event, select the date and time, and add Video conferencing to automatically create a Meet link for this event.
You can use this Event details page to set up your Breakout rooms ahead of time!
Click on the Video conferencing settings icon.
Here you can adjust the host settings for added security and ADD breakout rooms. Once set up, the breakout rooms will be available in your Meeting and you can open and close these as you would when using the manual setup.
See these steps in Video format:
Or learn more about Breakout rooms in this video below: