Increase interaction using breakout rooms | Learn English with Cambridge

Hello, everybody.

Greg here with another online teaching tip as part

of the Supporting Every Teacher campaign,

which aims to help all

of you teachers who are now teaching from home.

Teaching online can sometimes be challenging in terms

of varying interaction amongst participants.

It can often be just the teacher talking

or individual students talking.

Or you can have all

of your students speaking at the same time,

which can be really confusing.

A solution to this is using breakout rooms.

You can place your students in virtual rooms

with another student or as part of a group,

maximising participation at any one time.

You can choose how many rooms you want

and how many students are in each room.

And this can be done either randomly or manually.

And remember, this isn’t fixed

as you can move students during activities as well.

You can also place a time limit

on how long you want your students in a room for.

Don’t worry,

once your students are in their rooms,

you can still both monitor and talk to them.

One way of doing this is by entering in the room.

This allows you to see and hear the participants

and any work they may have done.

For example, on the whiteboard.

You can also broadcast message all students at once,

which means you can change an activity

or give encouragement.

And should your students need help,

they can alert you by sending a notification.

I personally use breakout rooms a lot in my classes.

It’s great for checking homework,

speaking activities,

or feeding back in pairs before class wide feedback.

So, there you go.

A useful feature

that gives your online classes more variety and makes them

more student centred.

Please remember, though,

although we’ve used Zoom as an example today,

this is a feature

that’s available on lots of online platforms.

Before you go,

I’d like to remind you to click on the link below

for more resources.

And, of course,

please don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and ask

your students to as well.

And I’ll see you next time with another online teaching tip.

See you later.