Small groups can currently be achieved by:
• Creating a Teams meeting and placing it in an assignment in Canvas for certain students.
• Only allowing certain students at designated times into a Teams meeting.
• creating and using a Team and add channels to be used for small groups of students.

You can schedule meetings in the channels for those small groups to meet with you.

The IT Division is currently previewing a Teams Breakout Room feature that should allow for more seamless management of breakout groups with organizer monitoring. This feature, if tested successfully, should be available for all users by mid-September.

Until then, you’re advised to conduct break out groups in 1 of 2 ways after first creating a channel within each class Team, with students assigned in small groups to each channel:

1. Select “End Meeting” in the main instructional meeting when directing students to sub-channels within a Team for breakout groups. Doing so prevents students from lingering unsupervised in the main instructional group. This best practice is shared with teachers by Innovative Learning in all of their Teams training, particularly in the Teams for Web Conferencing and Best Practices in Web Conferencing webinars (which are recorded). With the new security measures, students are no longer able to click a meeting link and start a meeting.
   
   or
   
   
2. Connect a second client (e.g., muted cell phone, muted extra tablet, Teams browser version on the same laptop on mute) to the current main Teams meeting, allowing the teacher to monitor the main meeting room and read the chats of students lingering in the main channel, while interacting with small student groups in the sub-channels.