Tech Thursday: Share Screen to Breakout Rooms

You don't have to be in a breakout room to share your screen - now you can share the host screen to all the breakout rooms at once.

Zoom has finally solved a problem with breakout rooms by allowing the host(s) to share their screen with the breakout rooms. No more asking students to take a screenshot or write down the instructions, or figuring out workarounds involving outside handouts.

Instructions for how to share your screen to breakout rooms

1. Click Share Screen in the meeting controls. 

2. Enable the Share to breakout rooms option along the bottom of the share window (see the image below). 

3. Choose what you would like to share. 

4. Click Share.

The selected content - whether it’s your screen, a window, or just a portion of your screen - will be shared with all breakout rooms. Note that this will interrupt any active shares in any breakout rooms, so if students are sharing this will kick their share off the screen. If the group is using annotation tools or the whiteboard, that will be saved to the Zoom files before the host's shared content takes over.

Here’s what it looks like:

Image: Share screen to all breakout rooms

I still recommend sharing a portion of your screen (under advanced options) because that provides you with the most flexibility when needing to switch around to different windows or applications.

Hope this makes zoom sharing and breakout rooms run a little smoother this semester.

Past Tech Thursdays

• Student engagement: Climer cards / Digital exit tickets / Interactive quizzing / Online question management for classes & presentations / Wheel of Names (random name generator) / Providing audio feedback

• Accessibility: Accessibility Infographics / Two programs to reduce eyestrain

• Zoom: Name Breakout Rooms / Screen share in Zoom / How to Zoom in in Zoom

• Research: Managing references / Find free versions of articles / Text Capture Apps

• Using images: Extract text from images / Remove distracting backgrounds from photos / Using screenshots

• Google: “Publish” from Google Drive / Google Classroom updates / “Make a copy” function in Google Drive / Working in shared Google docs / Collaborating in Google Slides / Turn Google Forms into a formatted document

• Canvas: Deliver Instructions via Quizzes / Canvas “What-if” grades

• Productivity: Study Skills Videos / Keeping Notes on Students / Keyboard shortcuts / Text Expanders / Mailbird email program / Voice-to-text options / Custom URLs & QR codes / DropBox Paper for collaboration