Software
Google Meet is getting breakout rooms, but only for some educational clients to get started.
Google's Meet video conferencing service is getting breakout rooms, but they're only going to be available to G Suite Enterprise for Education customers at first, according to a Google blog post (via 9to5Google). With this feature, teachers and educators will be able to split up their classes into smaller groups for items like projects or concentrated discussions.
Google will allow you to make up to 100 breakout rooms in a single call. If you've determined how many breakout rooms you want, Google will automatically bundle people into rooms on call, but moderators can manually assign people to other rooms if they want to. Meeting moderators may also hop between rooms to sign in for groups.
If breakout rooms are something you may like to check out, but you're not an Enterprise for Education user, you might be able to use them sometime soon — the functionality is coming to other G Suite and Google Workspace versions "later this year," according to Google.
Videoconferencing rival Zoom is already offering breakout rooms to all users (and has been available since 2015), so Google is playing catch-up with this feature. Zoom users can only break up to 50 separate rooms, which is half of the 100 possible rooms provided by Google Meet.
Google Meet has continuously added functionality over the course of this year to compete with Zoom and other video conferencing platforms as the use of these applications has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
