Over the past year, video conferencing has become essential for teaching, learning, and staying connected. Whether you’re still teaching remotely, in a hybrid environment, or have returned to in-person instruction, Meet provides an easy, reliable, and secure way for your school community to connect. Today, we’re announcing new Meet features to continue supporting the changing needs of school communities.
Secure by design
Meetings started from Google Classroom will soon be safer and more secure by design, and these updates will be available in the coming months:
- All teachers and co-teachers in a Classroom class will meet the hosts in Meet by default, so multiple teachers can share the burden of managing a class.
- Once a teacher is present, students who are on the Classroom list will be automatically admitted to the meeting. Students will be placed in a “waiting room” and will not be able to see or communicate with other participants until a teacher is present.
- Anyone not on the Classroom list will have to “request to join” and only the teacher(s) can allow them into the meeting.
All meetings, including those started from Meet or Calendar, will receive the following additional security updates in the coming months:
- When a host ends breakout rooms, participants will receive a warning and then be forced to return to the main meeting.
- Hosts can match meeting room security settings to main meeting security settings.
- To quickly avoid distractions, hosts will be able to turn off everyone’s video at once with “video blocking.”
- For hosts using tablets and mobile phones, we’re adding important meeting security controls, like the ability to end meetings for all call participants and mute them at once.
Improved integration makes meetings launched from Classroom safer and more secure by default
When hosts finish breakout rooms, participants will be forced to return to the main meeting.
To give more control to administrators, starting this month we will add settings to the Admin Console so that school leaders can set policies for who can join their school’s video calls and whether people in their school can join video calls from other schools. This helps administrators create appropriate boundaries for students of different ages, facilitate outside speakers, and more. Please note that this update does not change your default experience; Your experience will only change if your administrator changes your current settings.Administrators will also soon have a new setting to control whether the quick access is enabled by default, and another setting to control whether people can use chat in meetings.
And in the coming weeks, administrators with Education Standard and Education Plus can end any meeting in their organization directly from the research tool, and quick access will be automatically disabled so that no one can rejoin the meeting without the host present. .
Administrators can end any meeting in their organization directly from the investigation tool.
Easier to use
To make it easier for you to connect with your students during the presentation, we recently launched a revamped Meet experience which allows you to see the content of your presentation and the students at the same time. You can unpin your presentation or minimize your autofeed to see more students on the call, and names are always visible so you can see who’s who. You can also use different layout options to customize what you want to focus on.
The revamped user interface makes it easier to interact with your students during the presentation.
We also recently announced that meetings not launched from Classroom will soon begin supporting multiple hosts, making it easier for you to collaborate with others who help manage a class. You’ll be able to choose meeting co-hosts, and all meeting hosts will have access to security controls. Several hosts will be deployed in the coming months.
Add co-hosts to share the burden of managing the class. As shown, co-hosts have access to security and moderation controls
More attractive and inclusive for all types of students
We recently released an improved icon and sound for hand raising hand so students can participate with even more confidence and teachers can more easily see and hear who raised their hand. People who raise their hands appear in the grid and there is a persistent notification so you can see how many people raised their hands and in what order. And once a student with a raised hand finishes speaking, their hand automatically lowers.
An improved hand-raising experience makes it easier for students to participate with confidence
Meet now supports closed captioning in five languages so people can follow them more easily and stay engaged. And in the coming months, you’ll be able to pin multiple tiles to customize what you want to focus on. For example, students can easily identify a sign language interpreter and the teacher so they can see both at the same time.
Pin multiple tiles to customize what you want to focus on
For educators with Teaching and Learning Enhancement or Education Plus, we’re introducing features that take engagement and inclusion to the next level. Later this year, Meet will offer live translated subtitles. With live translations enabled, you can listen to someone speaking one language and see real-time subtitles in another language. We hope this will be especially helpful in multilingual classrooms or when meeting with parents who speak a different language.
Make classes and conversations more accessible with live translated subtitles
In the coming months, you will be able to use closed captioning during live broadcasts. Soon you’ll also be able to host public livestreams streamed directly to YouTube so anyone outside of your institution can attend, ideal for school board meetings, school events, and more. Public live streaming will roll out in beta later this year and will be widely available to customers with Teaching and Learning Upgrade or Education Plus in early 2022.
Host school board meetings, events, and more with public live streams on YouTube
Using Meet beyond distance learning
We’ve been inspired to see how educators use Meet to improve the learning experience for students , professional development and involving the entire school community. As the needs of school communities change, Meet will continue to adapt to help people teach, learn, and stay connected, whether remotely or in-person.
By Maryam Sanglaji. See the full article here.
