Five Ideas for Online Breakout Room Activities

Breakout rooms in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet provide a good way to get students talking and working in small groups. For some students, talking to a couple of classmates in a small breakout room is a lot less intimidating that talking to you "in front" of the whole class. Small breakout rooms give students a chance to talk and test ideas with a couple of classmates before subjecting their ideas to the silent or spoken criticism of the whole class. There are lots of other ways to think about using breakout rooms, here are some of my ideas for using breakout rooms with students. 

1. Digital Scavenger Hunts/ Digital Breakout Games

Get students working together to solve problems as part of a digital scavenger hunt that unlocks little rewards. If you have a Breakout EDU account, you might find some good digital challenges there. Otherwise, consider using Flippity's online scavenger hunt template to create a game in which students solve problems to unlock each part of the game.

2. Peer Review

We often associate peer review with writing. There are plenty of other areas in which peer review is an appropriate activity. I'm having students conduct peer review of the apps they're designing in my class. You might have students conduct peer review of short videos they've created. 

3. Three Color "Quiz"

A couple of years ago I was doing some reading on formative assessment methods and came across a paper published by the University of Nebraska Digital Commons (link opens a PDF of the paper). In that paper was the outline for an activity called a three color quiz. I started using that activity in my classroom and found it quite useful in determining which of my students knew material on their own and which ones needed help. The premise is that students spend a few minutes writing about a topic on their own in one color. Then they spend a few minutes writing while consulting a couple of classmates. That writing appears in a second color. Finally, they spend a few minutes writing while consulting classmates, their notes, and textbooks/websites. That writing appears in a third color. 

4. Project Planning/ Progress Monitoring

One of my classes is working on year-long independent and small-group projects. I use a SMART project planning and monitoring framework with them to try to keep them moving on the projects. Using breakout rooms is a good way to give students a time and place for discussions about their projects. 

5. Virtual Social Time

One of the things that a lot of kids are missing right now is the experience of social interactions with classmates. Yes, many of them are Snapping, TikTok-ing, and texting their friends. But that doesn't replace having a conversation with classmates who aren't in their current circle of friends. Consider giving your students 5-10 minutes for casual conversations to interact with classmates they might not otherwise be communicating with. 

How to Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet

Breakout rooms can be useful to get students talking and working in small groups in a virtual class meeting. Here are directions for creating breakout rooms in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. 

How to Create Breakout Rooms in Zoom
To create breakout rooms in Zoom you'll first need to make a small change in your account settings. The change is to enable the breakout rooms option so that a "breakout rooms" button appears in your meeting controls during your meetings. 

To enable breakout rooms in Zoom:

1. Open your account settings. 
2. Select the "Meeting" tab. 
3. Select "In Meeting (Advanced)."
4. Move the Breakout Room slider icon to the on position. 
5. Breakout rooms should now appear as an option in the meeting controls for every meeting you host. 

How to Create Breakout Rooms in Microsoft Teams

This is a new feature in Microsoft Teams. To use the breakout rooms function you need to be using the latest version of Microsoft Teams (check with your IT admin if you're not sure that you're on the latest version). Then you can follow the detailed directions that Mike Tholfsen (product manager for Microsoft EDU) provides in this video. 

How to Create Breakout Rooms in Google Meet

Google Meet offers a breakout room functionality only for those people who are using a paid version of Google Workspaces or G Suite for Education Enterprise Edition. If your school has the paid version, you can enable breakout rooms by clicking on the "activities" icon during a call. You can find more details about the feature here. 

For those who are using the free version of Google Workspaces or G Suite for Education, there is a third-party Chrome extension for creating breakout rooms. The latest version addresses some of the problems with previous iterations. One thing to keep in mind when reading reviews of third-party extensions is that developers are often at the mercy of Google's constantly evolving policies and programs. That means that sometimes an extension stops functioning correctly not because of something the developer did but because Google made a change that the developer hasn't yet responded to. 

Here's a video of how to use the Google Meet Breakout rooms Chrome extension. 

How to Find "Lost" Items in Google Drive

In my previous post I shared directions for uploading files and folders into Google Drive. In that post I also described how I loosely organize my files in Google Drive. If you're like me and also have a very broad interpretation of "organize," you'll want to use search function in Google Drive to find your old files. I use the search function to search according to keyword and filetype within my account. When I do that I can usually find what I'm looking for fairly quickly.

In this short video I demonstrate how I use the search functions in Google Drive to find files whose names I can't remember ten years after I created them. 

How to Move Desktop Files and Folders Into Google Drive

Last week I received a question from a reader who was looking for a little help organizing all of the files that she had created and stored on her computer. My suggestion was to organize the files into folders then upload those folders into Google Drive. Once the folders are in Google Drive they can be accessed from any computer. The process of uploading folders into Google Drive is a straight-forward one. In the following video I demonstrate how to move folders and individual files from your computer to your Google Drive account. 

I organize my files into a handful of big folders according to units that I teach throughout the year. I don't do this, but some people that I've worked with create sub-folders with unit folders. Those sub-folders are then labeled with things like "quizzes" or "group projects." The structure that you use for folders isn't as critical as it used to be because you can always use the search function with Google Drive to search for the file you need (as long as you can remember what you called it). 

What is a DDos Attack? - A Simple Explanation

Were you one of the millions of people frustrated by Google services like Classroom and Gmail being down earlier today? If so, and you turned to Twitter to see who else was talking about it, you may have noticed that #DDoS was a trending topic as people speculated that perhaps Google was the victim of a DDoS attack. (So far Google has not given an explanation of what caused the outage). 

I had one student in my classroom this morning and the rest were virtual. Since I couldn't reach my virtual students I scrapped this morning's lesson plan and talked with my one in-person student about network and data security. We ended up spending a good bit of time talking about DDoS as it was a trending and relevant topic for my class. Specifically, we did a lot of speculation on the various ways a DDoS attack might get started. 

If you're wondering what the heck a DDoS attack is and why it would be relevant to all users of cloud-based services, take a look at PowerCert's animated explanation of DDoS. It's one of the best "non-techy" explanations I've found.

Update: 10:45am ET Google released a short statement about the outage. It was not related to a DDoS attack.