Google Meet introduces new features for ‘students and teachers’

Soon after the pandemic hit our lives, working and studying from home became a forced necessity. But with the increasing incidents of online harassment during virtual academic classes, video conferencing app Google Meet introduced some key features for better video calling experience.

With greater focus on security control measures, Google Meet will now let teachers decide who can join their virtual classes. Highly advanced safety locks have been enabled to avoid gatecrashing of any sorts in between these meetings. Teachers can block any unknown user from entering the class and control each participant’s activities.

The new version of the app also gives teachers the control to start and end a meeting. Previously, students could remain active in a virtual class even after the teacher made an exit. However, teachers can end the meeting for everyone hereafter.

“Getting everyone’s attention when class is deep in a discussion can be tough, so we’re also giving teachers an easy way to mute all participants at once. Rolling out over the next few weeks, “mute all” will help educators keep class on track. And since sometimes it’s important to teach without interruption, launching in the coming months, meeting hosts will be able to control when students can un-mute themselves,” Google blog quoted.

The new ‘mute all’ feature by Google Meet can also be very useful during an online class. It will aid in providing noise-free classes. Students will no longer be able to unmute themselves during a meeting without the teacher’s permission.

Meanwhile, the search engine is also planning to integrate Google Classroom with Google Meet by the end of this year.

“Later this year, Classroom and Meet will work together even better, so every meeting created from Classroom is even safer by default. When meetings are generated from Classroom, students won’t be able to join before the teacher. Meet will also know who’s on the Classroom roster, so only students and teachers in the class will be able to join. And every teacher in Classroom will be a meeting host by default, so if there are multiple teachers, they’ll be able to share the load of managing the class,” the blog quoted.