The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted education across the world. In these difficult times, the video conference services like Zoom and Google Meet became a great tool for remote learning. For Google Meet, the company is now rolling out more controls for teachers and admins to offer a better experience.
With these new options, the school admin or the teacher can turn on/off screen sharing for all their students. When disabled, there will be no “Present now” option for the students. Similarly, the moderators can even disable the “Send chat messages” option.
New moderator controls coming to Google Meet for Education
Of course, both these features will still be available for the host even when turned off. The teacher will be able to send text messages or links to the students. However, there will be no option for the students to reply back. The roll-out comes with a caveat, though.
When rolled out, both the options will be turned on by default. If needed, the host has to turn off during each meeting. These new changes are limited just to the web and will not make it to native mobile apps. Furthermore, the new Google Meet controls are strictly limited to G Suite Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education account users.
The newly added controls can be found under the “Host controls” section. The Google Meet Chrome extensions installed in the browser might even cause issues for using these new features. Google recommends the hosts to turn off the extensions.
In July, the company also started blocking anonymous users by default in G Suite for Education meetings. Google made this change to avoid zoombombing. In the early days of COVID-19, several schools started banning Zoom mainly for this security issue.
The company has introduced several new moderator features in the last few months to improve its service. It also added a new option that restricts others from joining the virtual classroom until the teacher arrives.
Read receipts coming to Google Chat in October
Unlike the G Suite Enterprise accounts, which supports up to 250 participants per meeting, the G Suite Education accounts are limited to a maximum of just 150 participants. As seen in the instant messaging apps like WeChat and Messenger, Google Chat will also start showing read receipts starting early October.
Though the feature works on Android, iOS, and the web, it is only limited to just one-on-one messages. Google Chat will be replacing Hangouts for G Suite customers later this year.