Teams Meetings Features: Sharing Screen, Breakout Rooms, and Background Options

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We’ve talked previously about how to create Teams Meetings from Canvas and how to join those meetings. Today we’ll look at some of the features available inside of a meeting, such as sharing your screen or dividing participants into breakout rooms.  

Sharing Screen 

Teams makes it easy to show files, apps, content from a secondary camera (like a document camera), or even your entire desktop in a meeting.  

In the top right corner of your meeting window, you’ll see an icon of an arrow inside a rectangle. Click that to open the share options. Here, you can choose how the content should look (e.g., whether you want to appear along with the shared content) with the presenter mode options. Below that, you can choose what exactly you want to share!  

• Screen will show your entire desktop. 
• Window will share a single open window (a browser, an app, etc) – and just that. It won’t show your entire desktop or other windows you have open.
• PowerPoint Live allows you to choose and share a PowerPoint presentation.
• Microsoft Whiteboard creates a whiteboard that either you can only edit or that everyone in the meeting can edit. You can add images, documents, notes, plain text, or freehand draw on it. For more information check out Using Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams. 

When you want to stop sharing content, click the “stop presenting” button at the top of your Teams window.  

Breakout Rooms 

Teams allows you to create breakout rooms to facilitate small group discussions. You can either create these breakout rooms and assign participants either before the meeting starts or during the meeting. In addition, you can set a time limit for breakout rooms. Want your students to discuss a topic for 5 minutes before returning to the main meeting and sharing their takeaways? If you set a time limit (and have “automatically move people to rooms” turned on), Teams will seamlessly bring all of the groups back to the main meeting when those 5 minutes are up.  

A quick note: you must be using the desktop version of Teams to create and manage breakout rooms. 

For details about using breakout rooms, check out Use breakout rooms in Teams meetings. 

Adjusting your Background 

Teams gives you more options about what kind of background you want for your video. To see your options, click the “three dots” menu in the settings bar and select “apply background effects.” You can choose from any of the provided options or add your own through the “add new” link. If you want to test out the backgrounds before you choose, select the “preview” button at the bottom of the panel. Your video in the meeting will be paused until you choose a background and click the “apply and turn on video” button.  

Questions? Please drop us a comment below or email us at ctl@cedarville.edu. We’d love to help you out.  

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