New Google Meet Features

By Abdullah Ashrafi

Google unveiled a variety of new features to its Google Meet conference program to make virtual education more straightforward. Google says for Meet that a wider tiled view that can display up to 49 meeting attendees, initially announced by Google in June, will now arrive in September. Google first released its tiled view for Meet in April, with the ability to see only 16 members at a time. Being able to see 49 individuals at once would put the gallery view of Meet on par with Zoom's. In September, Google also incorporated its digital whiteboard product, Jamboard, into Meet, and in October, Google added the ability to blur or replace your Meet background with another image, which was initially announced in June. Also made available in October to G Suite Enterprise for Education customers was the ability to branch out into breakout rooms, allowing virtual classes to split out into smaller group discussions. Students will have access to their assigned group and the main call, and they can switch between the two whenever they would like. Teachers can also move from group to group to administrator the students. Google also announced that it will also add a Poll and Question/Answer option under the Activities tab for these customers. The teacher can make a poll question and he/she can see all the results from the people who responded. As per the Question and Answer option, the teacher can enable this feature and the students can put in any inquiries they might have versus the chat box which some teachers might mistaken for a regular comment. Teachers will also be able to monitor attendance at meetings as well.

Google is also announcing that it will add further moderation controls to assist Meet moderators and educators on the G Suite Enterprise for Education tier to handle classes more easily. With these new controls, moderators would be able to stop people from attending meetings after they have been thrown out of the room twice, which may help deter individuals from rudely disrupting classes . In addition, Google will allow moderators to end a meeting class at the same time for everyone, accept or deny bulk requests to join a class, turn off in-meeting talk, limit who can attend a class, and turn on a setting that will not start a meeting until the instructor has entered.

These are some of the improvements that Meet has made to keep up with its competitor, Zoom. Both services are improving and consistently adding new features to meet the needs of its customers. But, inevitably, only one will rise and overcome the other.