Why use breakout rooms and how to use it | bigbluebutton

Breakout rooms are a great way for remote online classroom students to collaborate and exchange ideas. They're also an excellent opportunity for knowledge sharing and training. If you have been considering using breakout rooms in your online teaching, then here are some reasons why bigbluebutton breakout rooms might be the best solution!

Why use breakout rooms?

Here are some of the benefits of using Breakout Rooms

1. Breakout rooms are valuable for small groups of students who want to collaborate and learn collaboratively with their virtual classmates. It's a great tool to get students more engaged in the course materials and easily facilitate all types of active learning inside your online classroom – even if you are working with non-traditional classrooms or those who prefer to work separately from each other. 
2. Breakout rooms are created especially for teachers who want to create a small community where each student can talk about course materials with the rest of his group. For example, if a teacher wants to teach students how to solve complicated math problems or discuss some essay topics, she can do it through breakout rooms.
3. Breakout rooms are like chatrooms that are designed for small groups of people and allow them to work on their goals together in a relatively short period of time.
4. Breakout rooms are often used for small-scale discussions with students, where teachers can ask them to analyze something together and deliver a certain paper in order to get some feedback from the class or use it as an example of what kind of work is expected from students during that course.
5. If you are a busy teacher who often can't find enough time to talk to all students individually, breakout rooms can be an extremely useful tool for teaching online or connecting with your class more effectively – because almost every virtual education platform offers this feature as part of its courseware.
6. Breakout rooms are a fun way for students to learn and enhance their skills in small groups where they can get some help from the rest of their classmates or discuss something about the class together. Some teachers even disable chat for breakout rooms, so that students will stay focused on what they have been assigned to do as a group – this way students will work in a more concise manner and won't lose their focus while collaborating.

How to use BigBlueButton Breakout rooms

1. First, you must log in as a moderator because only they have permission to open the breakout room.
2. Click the gear icon and select "Create breakout Rooms."
3. You are now at the window where you can change the number of rooms, how long users have in each room, and if you want to randomly assign users to a room or if you want to choose on your own.
4. After you have set the settings, click on "create". Then all the people in the main meeting rooms will go to a new login screen for the breakout rooms, based on their group.
5. As a moderator, you can join any room that you want, and you can also only join the audio of a selected room. This gives teachers the best possibility to control and manage their classes.
6. When the meeting time ends, all breakout rooms will end automatically and you can go back to the main meeting room. You need to rejoin the audio again.
7. If you want to stop the breakout room before the timer is up, the moderator can hit the end button. Then it is the same, all users need to rejoin the audio again.

That is how bigbluebutton breakout rooms work. BigBlueButton breakout rooms are a valuable tool for not usually the online curriculum, but also those who prefer to work separately from each other. If you never use it before, you should start now.