Microsoft Teams breakout rooms are almost here! The feature was announced several months ago, but we’ve finally got our first look at officially supported breakout rooms in Team as well as a release date of October 2020.
Until now teachers have had to work out their own way to create breakout rooms in their online classes, but Microsoft will now be building the feature directly into the app.
From the released screenshot above it looks like breakout rooms will be accessible during video meetings and will allow the teacher to create new rooms, open and close rooms, as well as assigning students to specific rooms.
Teachers will also be able to hop between breakout rooms to follow student discussions and keep things on track.
Coming in October, breakout rooms will allow meeting organizers to split up meeting participants into smaller groups to facilitate brainstorming sessions or workgroup discussions. Presenters can choose to hop between breakout rooms, make announcements to all breakout rooms, and/or close the breakout rooms that then bring everybody back into the main meeting.
This is another great development for schools and builds on the stack of recent updates such as Together Mode and allowing up to 49 students on screen at once.
Does Microsoft’s official breakout rooms support do everything you need it to do? Is there anything here that you still think needs to be added? Let me know in the comments.
Want to learn more about Microsoft Teams?
If you’re new to Microsoft Teams, start here. This book will give you must-have insight on chatting, file sharing, organizing teams, using video communication, and more. You’ll also see just how you should be doing things, with best-practice recommendations and ideas for integrating Microsoft Teams into your existing lesson plans.
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