What's New this Week for Extensions and Addons?
Extensions for Google Meet
Some of our teachers are choosing to use Google Meet (formerly Hangouts) instead of Zoom. Interacting in real-time can be a way to deliver direct instruction or just keep up the social connection with your class. Google Meet is free for G Suite users until the end of July 2020.
Google Meet needs some extensions to run effectively, so last week we enabled these:
- Google Meet Grid View: Shows participants' videos in a grid view
- Meet Mute: shows icon in the taskbar that shows if you are muted (good for students)
- Meet Push to Talk: Hold spacebar down to momentarily mute. Side benefit is that students enter meeting MUTED. This extension has been pushed out to all students.
- Meet Attendance:This clever add on takes attendance by writing meeting attendee names into a Google Sheet when you visit the extension's People tab.
We have set Meet in our domain so that students cannot make meetings themselves. This means that they cannot join a meeting before the host (i.e., the classroom teacher). This will work even for the permanent link you have in your Google Classroom. For ending the meeting, you need to make sure all students have left the meeting (or you can remove them) before ending the meeting. This works for your Google Classroom permanent meeting code as well. Google has provided all of the details in this support page, and the video below explains it too.
To help you learn to use Meet effectively, I added a Meet video playlist to our YouTube channel for AMS teachers.
Next week we'll have more updates on apps you can use for science teaching. Stay tuned.
