How to use breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams

I'll be showing breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams meetings. So have meeting here, and I'm gonna click it, and I'll click Join. So I'm gonna join meeting, and we're gonna break people into rooms, and then show exactly how this all works, so let's click Join. Hey folks. So to get started, what I'm gonna do is on the top of my meeting, there's this little breakout rooms icon, and I'm gonna click this. The first thing it's gonna ask me is how many breakout rooms do you wanna create? Now I'll just be creating four today, and I'll drop this down and choose four, but you can create up to 50 breakout rooms, so you've got lot of flexibility. The other option here is participants, and would you like to automatically assign them, which I'll be doing here, and it says assign 15 people into four rooms, or you can choose to manually add participants into each breakout room. But I'll be choosing Automatically, and I'll say Create Room. Now on the right-hand pane, you can see it's created four different rooms, and it has four people, four people, four people, and three. The number of people's indicated with that little parentheses there. Now could choose to add additional rooms here, which I'm not gonna do, but can also rename the rooms. So in this case, I'm gonna choose the dot-dot-dot menu, and choose to rename this room, and we'll give them colors. So this is the blue room. And we'll just speed ahead and rename the other rooms colors. What can do next is can actually choose to move people around, so you can see, as open up each room, you can see these people are assigned automatically to the rooms. And haven't started the rooms yet. So let's say have Mr. Adam Short-Shorts here. He's in the blue room, but you know what? think, he's on team Flipgrid, he should be in the green room, right Adam? So let's assign, and I'm gonna move Adam over to the green room. So now down here, you can see that Adam is in the green room. So it's really easy to move people around if they're not in the room that gets automatically assigned. Let's go into room settings. So go to the dot-dot-dot and click Room Settings, and by default, everyone gets automatically moved into open rooms, but can uncheck that if wanted to do it manually, but we'll leave it checked. Also you can recreate the rooms. What does that mean? That means can blast away all the current rooms, and it will let me recreate like five or 10 more rooms. I'm not gonna do that right here, but if you need to restart and blast 'em away, that's where you do it. And now, we are ready to start our rooms. So I'm gonna click the Start Rooms button right here, and while on the attendees' side, what's gonna happen is they're gonna get pulled into the breakout room that I've set up, so they'll get pulled out of this main meeting, and they will get pulled into their breakout room meetings, and then we'll show what it looks like to be inside on the attendees' side, so let's click Start Rooms, and get ready to say goodbye to everyone. They're gonna get moved into their rooms. Bye. Now what if somebody joins the meeting late? Like here's an example right here. - my gosh, Mike, I'm totally late. Where do go? - don't worry Ann, will be able to assign you to room. Y'know, think you would be perfect in the green room with team Flipgrid, so I'm gonna assign Ann right here, so Ann Kozma, I'm gonna select her name and choose Assign. And it asks which room, I'm gonna put you in the green room. Bye-bye Ann. One thing can do is send message to everyone that wanna communicate. So can make an announcement across all the breakout rooms. Hey folks, start brainstorming on your Whiteboard, and I'll send this, and everyone will get this message in their chat. Then in the upper-right, there's new announcement, new message. Now Steven's gonna open the chat panel, and this is the message sent by the organizer, who is me in this case. So that comes right through and everyone can get sense of what the announcements are. Now I'm gonna leave this meeting and go show how the organizer can officially join into another breakout room. I'm gonna go visit the green room and see how they're doing in there. click the dot-dot-dot, and I'll click Join Room. That is beautiful looking Whiteboard, I'm joining the green room. This is where the party is. (employees laugh) Woo! Great, so I'm gonna go and leave now and make message post to tell everyone to come back into the main room. I'll see y'alls later. And then to just go back into my main meeting, click Resume. Now the breakout rooms have had plenty of time to be working on their brainstorming, I'm gonna send message that I'll be closing the breakout rooms in just minute, so we go to the dot-dot-dot again, choose Make an Announcement. I'll be closing the breakout rooms in one minute, so I'll send this out. We've sent an announcement to all of the rooms. Okay, now to close the rooms out and bring everyone back into this meeting, I'm gonna click Close Rooms. So it'll bring everyone back. Now I've switched to one of the breakout rooms to show what they experienced. There's message that appears that says this room will close in 10 seconds, and you'll automatically be moved back into the main meting. Hey everyone, welcome back from the breakout rooms. Looks like lots of great brainstorming and collaboration was happening in there.