Google Meet announced the expected release of a host of interesting new features that will transform the whole video conferencing experience particularly for us in education. The new features focus on three main areas: engagement, security, and inclusivity. Over the next few months, Meet will be integrating more safety and security features, refreshed video layouts, closed captions in five languages, live translated captions and many more. Below is a quick round up of some of Google Meet’s new features. For more details and information check out Google’s blog post.
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| Google blog |
1- Security features coming to meetings initiated from Google Classroom
Some of these security measures include:
- “Every teacher and co-teacher in a Classroom class will be meeting hosts in Meet by default, so multiple teachers can share the load of managing a class.
- Once a teacher is present, students who are on the Classroom roster will be automatically admitted to the meeting. Students will be placed into a “waiting room” and won’t be able to see or communicate with other participants until a teacher is present.
- 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.”
2- More control for Admins
As Google noted, “starting this month we’re adding settings to the Admin console so 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”.
3- New layout options
With this new layout experience you will be able to “see your presentation content and students at the same time. You can unpin your presentation or minimize your self feed to see more of your students on the call, and names are always visible so you can see who’s who.”.
4- Live translated captions
Live translated captions will be introduced later this year and will be available for educators with the Teaching and Learning Upgrade or Education Plus. “With live translations enabled, you can listen to someone speaking one language and see real-time captions in another language. We expect this will be especially helpful in multilingual classrooms or when meeting with parents who speak a different language”.
