Assigning Participants to Breakout Rooms Manually in Zoom: A Comprehensive Guide

Zoom’s breakout rooms are a fantastic feature that can make your meetings more engaging and interactive, especially when you have a large number of participants. By assigning participants to breakout rooms manually, you have the flexibility to curate the group dynamics according to the needs of your meeting or training session. Here’s an enthusiastic guide to help you navigate through the process of manually assigning participants to breakout rooms in Zoom.

Step 1: Enable Breakout Rooms
First things first, ensure that the breakout room feature is enabled in your Zoom account settings. This is a one-time setup that will allow you to access breakout rooms in any meeting you host.

Step 2: Start Your Zoom Meeting
Begin by starting your scheduled Zoom meeting as the host. Once the meeting is active, you’ll see the option to create breakout rooms.

Step 3: Create Breakout Rooms
Click on the ‘Breakout Rooms’ button in your meeting toolbar. This will open a dialog box where you can choose how many rooms you want to create and how you wish to assign your participants. Select ‘Manually’ to assign participants yourself.

Step 4: Assign Participants
After selecting the manual option, you’ll see a list of participants in the meeting. Hover over the name of the participant you want to assign to a room, and you’ll see an ‘Assign’ button next to their name. Click it and select the room you want to place them in. Repeat this process for each participant you want to assign.

Step 5: Open All Rooms
Once you’ve assigned all participants to their respective rooms, click on the ‘Open All Rooms’ button. Participants will then be prompted to join their assigned breakout room. As the host, you can join any of the breakout rooms to check in on the discussions or provide guidance.

Step 6: Managing Breakout Rooms
As participants are discussing in their breakout rooms, you have the ability to broadcast messages to all rooms, close rooms, and even reassign participants if needed. This control allows you to manage the flow of your meeting effectively.

Step 7: Closing Breakout Rooms
When it’s time to bring everyone back to the main session, you can close the breakout rooms. Participants will be given a countdown before they are automatically returned to the main meeting room.

Additional Tips:

• Prepare a list of participants and their assigned rooms beforehand to streamline the manual assignment process.
• Consider naming your breakout rooms based on the activity or discussion topic to provide clear direction to participants.
• Communicate clear instructions and objectives for each breakout room session to ensure productive use of time.