Online classes have seen a sharp rise during this COVID-19 pandemic, and Google Meet is one such platform aiding educators to host ‘classes’ online. Huge online classes may overwhelm both teachers and the students, especially when the students need to interact with each other. Now Google has solved this problem. Google has rolled out a new feature called “breakout rooms” on Google Meet. This feature will allow the teachers to divide participants/students into smaller groups during the video call.
According to Google, the breakout rooms feature is currently available to its Enterprise for Education customers only. However, it says that this feature will be made available on other Google Workplace editions to more users later this year.
More About Google Meet Breakout Rooms
As per Google, the feature that allowed the call creator to group people into smaller rooms “was highly requested” by its users. The grouping of participants and putting them into smaller rooms could increase engagement by allowing them to make simultaneous small group discussions. Google has finally listened to the users’ demand and has launched the feature called breakout rooms. This feature allows the call creators or educators to make up to 100 breakout rooms discussions in the call. By default, it’ll distribute the participants randomly and evenly across various breakout rooms. However, the video call organizer can manually move the participants into different discussion rooms if he wishes.
The participants can hold discussions in the smaller groups and can then ‘easily’ rejoin the original meeting. Earlier this year, Google made the Meet video calling service free to everyone having a Gmail account. In June, the tech giant brought the service to the Gmail app on Android and iOS and added a new Meet tab to the Gmail app. The feature of breakout room creation is currently available on the web only but, anyone with a Gmail account can join.
