In an effort to provide more support for distance learning and as a direct response to increased use of Google Meet, Google has added several new security and engagement features to the software that should help teachers manage their interactions more easily. The official blog post features a treasure trove of content that is widely discussed, but we’ll simplify it here for you today.
Safety
First, Google Meet is gaining a number of tools that will help teachers protect not only their students, but also their bandwidth. In addition to last year’s security controls and advanced security locks, they will add the following tools in the coming months:
- An option for teachers to end meetings for everyone, including students in break rooms
- Silence all participants
- Control when students can unmute
- Access to key moderation tools for educators on tablets or phones (controlling who can attend a meeting or screen sharing)
- When meetings are generated from Classroom, students cannot participate before the teacher and teachers will be the meeting organizers by default
- Meet will review the Classroom list and only allow registered students to attend a meeting
- Meetings that don’t start in Classroom support multiple hosts so teachers can help each other make it easier
Wow! That’s a little bit. I particularly love how most of these resources focus on keeping students and teachers on the same page. With distance learning, I heard that many users have major problems with synchronicity in areas related to procedures and that it has been a challenge to replicate the nuances of the physical classroom over the web. We hope that these updates will solve a lot of this when they are finally released!
Engagement
Regarding engagement improvements, Google Meet is adding emoji reactions so that students can express themselves while they’re muted. That way, teachers can assess reactions to your content without being interrupted. The emoji can be handpicked by the teacher and students can even customize the emoji’s skin tone to better represent themselves. Although I think this should have happened more than a year ago, I think the video calls were more of a pre-pandemic of basic utility, and the emoji would probably have been seen as “unprofessional”.
We’ve already covered Google Meet updates on Chromebooks, but now, the company is improving software performance in all areas for users with low bandwidth connections! This is fantastic and is in line with the needs of the current state of our society.
Teachers will also be able to proactively set up break rooms in advance on the Calendar. This should help them to save time and reduce time during the lesson plan, no longer worrying about how to separate people for smaller group sessions.
Finally, students will be able to obtain a transcript of the meeting if they have not attended that day. However, this will happen later this year and will probably be the last thing to be released. Google Meet has just become an amazing tool for distance learning, and they’re taking it very seriously. It’s amazing to see how much they’ve worked on since the beginning of the pandemic and I have a feeling that while their focus is really on how they can serve users, it can also be fueled by the vigor of competition for innovation. At this point, I can’t think of anything they haven’t added or planned to add.
