Google Meet is getting new features for the Classroom, including the ability to livestream events. Google Meet is getting new features which will be designed to help with online learning and classroom. Google states that in the future all Meetings initiated from Google Classroom, which is a product solution designed for schools and online learning, will get these features.
Google plans to bring live translated captions to Meet in the coming months and teachers will be able to use closed captions during livestreams. They will also be to host public livestreams, which will be streamed right to YouTube so anyone outside of their institution can attend. Public live streaming will be rolling out in beta later this year. Google says it will be available for customers with the Teaching and Learning Upgrade or Education Plus in early 2022.
From a security perspective, Google says every teacher and co-teacher part of Classroom class will be meeting hosts in Meet by default. The company says this is being done to ensure that “multiple teachers can share the load of managing a class.”
Further, as soon as a teacher join the meeting, all “students who are on Classroom roster will be automatically admitted to the meeting.” Till the teacher joins the meeting, the students will be in a ‘waiting room’ where they can’t see or talk to other participants.
More importantly, “anyone who’s not on the Classroom roster will have to ‘ask to join’ and only the teacher(s) can allow them into the meeting,” notes the blog post.
Google is also adding some other security features to Meetings for classes. For one, when a host, which is the teacher, ends the breakout room, “participants will get a warning and then will be forced back into the main meeting.”
Further, hosts can match the breakout room safety settings with the safety settings from the main meeting. Teachers will also be able to turn off everyone’s video at once with “video lock.” Google says it is allowing this to cut out distractions.
For teachers who are using mobiles and tablets to conduct classes, Google will add “the ability to end meetings for everyone on the call and mute everyone at once.” It will also give school admins more control, so that “school leaders can set policies for who can join their school’s video calls and whether people from their school can join video calls from other schools. ”
Google says it will also make it easier for teachers to connect with students when they are presenting. Teachers can now unpin their presentation or minimise their self feed to see more students on the call. Names will always be visible so the teacher knows who is present on the call.
The hand-raise icon is also coming to Google Meet for education as well.
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