In this video I'm going to show you how to use Google Meet for remote teaching and specifically
I'll be focusing on the updates to Google Meet that have been released this year. So I'll show
you how to do things like blur your background for privacy, I'll show you some of the more advanced
host controls that are now available in Meet, I'll also teach you how to use the new Google Jamboard
Google Meet integration, and we'll also look at some of the other updates like the new layouts
that are available. Unfortunately most Google Meet users still don't have access to some of the more
anticipated updates like setting up breakout rooms, Q&As, and polls. Although I'm definitely
still waiting for those features, the new updates to Google Meet do make it a lot more functional to
use in education. My name is Sam Kary and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom.
If you appreciate the tips that I share in this video you can show your support by hitting the
like button, sharing it with other teachers that you know, and also subscribing to my channel and
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All right so before we get started it is important to know that some of the updates that I'm going
to show to Google Meet in this video will only be applicable if you have a G-Suite for education
account. All right so let's start here on my Google Meet home page and to start the meeting I'm going
to go down to this 'Join' button and here I'll give my meeting a nickname to make sure that it's more
secure. The purpose of giving your meeting a nickname is to help prevent students from
being able to join the meeting before you've actually initiated it. It is important to know
that once you hit this continue button and then move over to this other screen, students will
still be able to enter in this nickname meeting because you've essentially already started it,
even though technically you're not in the meeting yet. Now before I join the meeting I just want to
show you a few things about the settings here. So one is that if you go up to the three dot menu
and then go down to settings there you'll have some different choices for audio and video. So
a really easy way to improve the quality of your audio would be to plug in an external microphone
and then switch over your audio device here. And then on the video you can also do things like use
other cameras, so you could plug in an external webcam like I actually have installed here
or you can even do things like use third-party cameras like Loomie Live to bring in a virtual
avatar to your meeting. I do have a whole separate tutorial about how to set up a virtual avatar for
video conferences that you might also want to check out. Now a newer feature of Google Meet is
the ability to blur your background. To blur your background you just want to click on this blur
background icon and there you'll see that it just makes the background a little bit less visible.
This is a really easy way to just add a layer of privacy to your meetings so that you don't have
to worry as much about what's behind you on your webcam. Now if you have a G-Suite for education
account you're going to be limited to 100 participants in a Google Meet meeting. One way that
you can add additional participants or viewers of your meeting would be to add an in-house stream.
So if we go back to the menu here you'll see that there's an option to enable live streaming.
Once you select that option you'll see that it will populate a link below that you can share
with participants that you want to be able to view the live stream. This will allow you to
expand the audience of this meeting to up to 100,000 participants, though they'll only be able to
view the meeting and won't be able to actively participate in it. On the menu you'll also see
that there's an option to enable captions. Although this isn't a new feature, it is one of the features
of Google Meet that helps make virtual conferences more accessible so it is a good option to have.
All right now to join the meeting, I'm going to go ahead and click this 'Join Now' button and here if
I haven't already invited students to my meeting, I could copy this invite link and share it with them.
And you can also go down here to 'Add people' in order to select the specific names of students
that you want to allow into this meeting, but if you're using Google Meet with students and
you have Google Classroom, what probably makes the most sense is just to make sure that you have the
Google Meet meeting enabled on Google Classroom and that you initiate the meeting from there.
You'll see after I've joined the meeting that since I enabled streaming I can go ahead and
start the stream by clicking 'Start Streaming' here and if you don't want to stream, of course you can
just hit 'close.' All right now that a student has joined the meeting let's go up here to the chat
feature. With the older version of Google Meet there wasn't any way for an individual teacher
to control whether or not students could use the chat or not. They've since changed that so
here you can choose whether or not you want to enable chat or disable it at any given time.
So let's turn the chat feature off here and then if I hop over here to the student end
of the meeting you'll see that when the student clicks on chat that they get a message that tells
them that the chat feature for this meeting has been disabled, but then if you decide that
you want to enable the chat feature later, all you need to do is turn that feature back on.
And then if we go back over to the student account again, when they go back to the chat
feature they'll see that they're able to type in a chat response. I do like this ability to just turn
on and off the chat because it allows you to get students' attention for a particular period of time
and then just open up the chat for short durations in order to get student responses.
Another feature Google Meet has added is the ability to have higher level admin control over individual
meetings. So if you go back up here and click on 'People' you'll see that there's now an option
to choose host controls. Here you'll see that in addition to enabling or disabling the chat feature
you can also enable or disable the ability for students to share their screens. And then to access
additional host settings go down here to 'View host settings.' So here there's another option to disable
quick access to your meeting and if you disable quick access it will ensure that no one's able to
join the meeting if you haven't specifically invited them without asking permission first.
Disabling this feature will also mean that no one is able to join your meeting anonymously
and it will make it so that only the host of the meeting is able to dial out of the meeting. All
right now that we've looked at some of the new host controls that Google Meet offers, let's take
a quick look at the new Google Jamboard Google Meet integration. With this integration you can now open
up a Jamboard directly through Google Meet. So to access that you'll go down here to the three dot
menu and then you'll go up to whiteboard. When you click to open a new jam it will give you a choice
to either start a new Jamboard or to pull one in from your Google Drive. So I'm going to choose to
start a new Jamboard here and immediately after I do that you'll see that a box pops up asking me
to set the permissions level for that Jamboard for the other attendees in the meeting. Now you'll see
that the default setting with an education account is that the other attendees only have view access.
This could be okay if you just wanted to model something on Jamboard but if you wanted students
to actually be able to contribute to the Jamboard, you'll need to change it so that they have editing
access as well. You'll see that after you choose to set the permission level it will open up a new
Google Jamboard in a separate tab. It is important to note that right now I'm not sharing my screen,
so although it opened up Google Jamboard in another tab, my students aren't necessarily
going to be able to see it yet. Once you've created that Jamboard, you can interact with it.
So you can do different things like add sticky notes here. So I'll go ahead and just add a quick
one that says, "Good morning," and I do just want to mention that if you want to know all about
how to use Google Jamboard's tools, as well as get some different ideas for how you can use it,
you might want to check out the two other videos that I have on my channel specifically about how
to use Google Jamboard. Now that I've set up that Jamboard, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen
so that students can actually see it. So I'll go down here to 'Present now' and then I'm going
to choose to just present a Chrome tab, so I'll click on 'Chrome tab' and then I'll select Jamboard.
And once I do that you'll now see that there's a little blue rectangle on the chrome tab that
indicates that that's the tab I'm sharing with my students. So now let's look at this from the
student end. Since i'm sharing my screen with them, students are now able to see Jamboard directly in
that Google Meet meeting and then there's also a link in the chat that they can click on in
order to access that same Jamboard that they can interact with. If you direct students to click on
the link, it's just going to open up another tab. So what I would suggest you do is also teach them
how to split their screen so that they set it up and it looks like this. So what you can see here
is that on one side they would be able to see the screen that's being shared through the Google Meet
meeting, as well as the other participants in that meeting, and then they'd have their other tab open
with the Jamboard that they can actually write on. So here you can see that the student could add
some text and then once the student adds that, it's going to show up immediately on the collaborative
Jamboard for everybody else to see as well. Let's jump back over to the teacher side so that you
can see how it looks a little bit differently when you're the one who's actually sharing the screen.
So on my end all I can see is this box that's telling me that I'm presenting to everyone,
but I'm not able to actually see Jamboard directly embedded in Google Meet the same way
that the student is able to. All right next I want to show you how you can record a Google Meet meeting.
So what you'll do is go back to the three dot menu and then scroll up to 'Record this meeting.' After
you click that, it will prompt you to make sure that you've asked consent of everybody in your
meeting so that they know that it's being recorded. Once you click accept, it will start recording your
meeting and you'll be able to tell that it's recording because it will have this record icon
on the top left hand side of the screen. And then when you're ready to stop recording you can go
back to the three dot menu and then scroll up to 'Stop recording.' After you choose 'Stop recording,'
you'll see that it will also tell you that that recording is going to show up in your Google Drive,
so if you wait for a few minutes and then go over to Drive, you should see a new video file
of that meeting show up. Since sometimes students might miss our live synchronous classes that we
run through Google Meet, it would be a good idea to post these meetings back to Google Classroom
or whatever learning management system you're using, so that you make sure that what you
taught is accessible even if students aren't able to be there in real time. All right the
last updated feature that I want to show you here is how to change the layout of Google Meet.
So if you go back to the three dot menu and then scroll up to 'Change Layout,' there you'll
see that you have some different options for how your Google Meet meeting would be set up.
So a new update is this tiling option. Tiling is your best layout choice to be able to see all the
students in your class at the same time and would be the best option if you're going to do some sort
of whole group activity. With tiling you're able to see up to 49 people at the same time. Now one
thing that is important to know is that even though you might change the layout on your side,
that does not apply to the student end as well. So if a student wants to change the way that their
layout looks, they'll need to do that on their own on their side of the meeting. So let's say for
example that I'm sharing my screen here to show this Google Slides presentation to my students.
I could change the layout to 'Spotlight' so that it only shows what I'm sharing on the screen
and not the videos of other participants, however if we go back over to the student screen, you'll
see that their layout hasn't been changed. So if you wanted students to see the view with only the
shared screen and not the other participants you would have to prompt them to do that themselves.
This isn't that big of a deal, but it's definitely something that's worth pointing out to students.
When sharing your screen I personally like using this sidebar view where students can see the
screen you're sharing, as well as smaller images of other participants in the meeting. Like I mentioned
in the beginning, I'm still waiting for some of the features to be more universally available,
like breakout rooms, and the ability to add questions and polls, and once those features are
more available for users with education accounts, I'll definitely make a tutorial about them as well.
Thank you so much for watching my video to the end. If you found the tips that I shared helpful,
please share it with other teachers that you know, hit the like button, and subscribe to my
channel and hit the notification bell to make sure you don't miss any of my weekly updates.
You can also check out some of the other tutorials I have on my channel by clicking
on one of those two videos above and if you're interested in downloading any of the resources
that I've created and show on my videos please visit my website at www.newedtechclassroom.com.
Lastly if you want to check me out on social media, my Twitter handle, Facebook page, and
Pinterest account are all in the description below. Thanks so much and have a great week!