Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

Google Meet is introducing a new feature that will be able to make large group calls more useful for educators. In the next few days, teachers who use Enterprise for Education tier of Google Workspace would be able to create breakout rooms within video calls allowing them to divide all participants into small groups. The feature will come in the other versions of Google Workspace later this year.

To start a call, users have to tap on the Activities button and select Breakout Rooms. Organizers can create 100 rooms in a call. Call participants are distributed randomly into rooms of equal sizes but one can manually assign people to different rooms.

Image Source : Nerds Chalk

Organizers can themselves join the breakout rooms but they can’t see the chat messages that have been exchanged when they were not in the room. They can set time limits for the room and shuffle them so that participants get into virtual food fights.

There are caveats as the fact that users can create rooms on a computer and Breakout Rooms cannot be live streamed or recorded.