Google
Hangouts Meet for Instruction
Best Practices for Instructors
Special considerations for student privacy, personal meeting room, and scheduled meetings.
Special considerations for student privacy
For best practices in using Google Hangouts Meet for online learning, please click here.
Know your districts policies on recording students, distributing media of students, and follow them.
Keep meeting information secure by
Only share invites and meeting codes with those who should be in attendance
Do not publicly post the meeting URL
Keep recordings secure by limiting the way you share them
Directly share the link
With a Google for Education account, only the meeting creator, calendar event owner, or person who sets up the meeting is able to mute or remove video meeting participants.
Meeting participants are able to turn off their camera to show their profile photo instead. This can be done to improve video meeting quality if internet speed is slow. A phone can be used for audio if audio quality is poor.
Live stream can be used instead of having students join an interactive video class meeting. You can also pre-record a lesson to share at a later time.
Google Hangouts Meet sessions are live links. To prevent students from being able to reenter the session after you have ended it, ask them all to remain in the session until you remove them from the Hangouts Meet. Once you have removed a user, they will not be able to reenter that session.
*Information from Google Support Site
Recent updates from Google
Approve requests to join—During a video meeting, only the meeting creator can see and approve requests to join the meeting from outside of the school’s G Suite domain.
If a teacher creates a meeting and wants to include guests with an email address that’s outside of their school domain, make sure they stay on the call until all external guests have been approved to join.
The following updates have started rolling out and should be available to all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers within 2-3 weeks.
Manage participants—Only the meeting creator can mute or remove participants.
Prevent meeting reuse—Participants can’t rejoin the call if teachers leave a nicknamed meeting last.
More on updates can be found here.
Creating a Meeting Link
Once your administrators have set up Google Hangouts Meet for your organization, simply go to meet.google.com and choose start a meeting. This will create a link for your meeting.
Share Joining Information
Once your meeting starts, click "copy joining info" and paste this information into an email or calendar invitation to invite your attendees establishing your meeting date and time.
*Note, once your Hangouts Meet is started, it is a live link that participants can join or leave at anytime.
Schedule a Meeting from Google Calendar
If using Google Calendar,you can start and share a Google Hangouts Meet right from your calendar. First, create your event. Then simply choose "Add conferencing" to create and share a Hangouts Meet link.
Security Considerations
Google uses encryption during transit of audio and video in Hangouts Meet. For more information click here.
Due to the recent increased use of online conferencing for remote learning, Google has also made or is working on the following security features:
Accessibility
Google has a variety of accessibility features to allow all users to participate in online conferencing.
These include:
Live captions
Screen readers and magnifiers
Keyboard shortcuts
Google meeting room hardware
To learn more about accessibility features, please click here.
Live Streaming
Streaming a Google Hangouts Meet is typically only available as part of G Suite Enterprise for Education. In response to the COVID 19 Pandemic, it is being offered free of charge through July 1st, 2020. Only guests within your organization can view the live stream. You can add up to 100,000 view-only guests. For more information on streaming, please click here.