Give Remote Control in Google Meet with One Click!

Google Meet provides a lot of ways to interact with others in your meeting. You can see other people, and speak with them, and text chat with them, and present your screen to them. However, sometimes we need more interaction than that.

For example it would be great to be able to give remote control of your computer and mouse to another person in the meeting, or to take control of someone else's computer. This could be useful if you wanted your student to do an activity on your computer in a teletherapy session, or if you need to give or receive technology support.

Unfortunately Google Meet does not have a built-in option to give remote control over to another person. Thankfully Google has provided an incredibly simple tool that can be used right along with Google Meet to accomplish this. That tool is called Chrome Remote Desktop.

To help with this I have recorded a quick 11-minute video that explains this in detail by covering three topics:

• First, how to install the Chrome Remote Desktop extension.
• Second, the normal method for using this tool to give remote control of your computer and mouse to someone else
• And third, a secret trick for a super easy and fast method to use this tool that will let even the youngest student control your mouse with a single click. That's right, just one click.

See below for the video...

3 Ways to See Your Students when Presenting in Google Meet

One of the great features of Google Meet is the ability to share your screen with your students or other meeting participants. This allows you to present a slideshow, navigate a website, work out a math problem, show a video, or provide any sort of instruction.

The problem is, once you share your screen to begin presenting, all you can see is, well... what you are presenting and not your students or audience anymore. This can make it difficult to stay connected to your students, assess their understanding, monitor their engagement, and take questions.

Thankfully there are several options for how you can stay connected with your students while presenting your screen. To demonstrate this I have recorded a short 7-minute video that shows 3 different ways to still see your students when you are presenting your screen in Google Meet.

Google Meet is now integrated in Google Classroom!

In an earlier blog post and video I explained how you can use Nicknames when creating a Google Meet to keep students from joining the Meet before you, or from rejoining the Meet after you have left. (You can see the post and video here.)

That method still works great, especially for those people who do not use Google Classroom at all, or if you are inviting students to a Meet who are not part of your Google Classroom. However for those who use Google Classroom, we now have a new easy option for managing Meets with your students!

In general here's how it works…

• For each Google Classroom you have, you can now generate a unique Google Meet link for the students in that Classroom. 
• The link for the Meet can be displayed on the Stream page and the Classwork page of the Classroom so you and your students can access it easily. 
• You can use the same Meet link over and over again anytime you want to video conference with your students. 
• However, the students cannot join the Meet without you, so they can't access the Meet before you are there, or rejoin the Meet after it is over and you have left. 

See below for detailed directions on how to use this feature, as well as a short 6-minute video that demonstrates all the steps.

Whiteboard Tools for Google Hangouts Meet

When you are in a video conference like Google Hangouts Meet, a valuable tool to have is a digital interactive whiteboard. You can use this to give instruction, like a math teacher working out a problem, or it can be collaborative where everyone in the meeting is working together to brainstorm or design or complete an interactive activity.

Unfortunately Google Meet does not have a built-in whiteboard tool. However, there are many excellent whiteboard tools that can be used with Google Meet. For example, two great Google tools that can be use as digital whiteboard in Meet are Google's Chrome Canvas and Google Jamboard.

To show how to use these tools, and specifically how to use them inside of a Google Meet for teaching as well as collaborating with students, I recorded a short 8-minute video. See below for the video and related resource links.

How to Keep Students from Joining or Rejoining a Google Meet without You

Google Hangouts Meet is a great tool for teachers to connect with students in a video conference, for instruction, questions, presentations, and more.

However it is understandable that many schools would prefer not to have students in a school-provided video conference without the teacher present. That is, schools may not want students to be able to join a Meet before the teacher gets there, or be able to rejoin a Meet after the teacher has left. Thankfully Google has provided an option to manage this.

To help with this I have recorded a short 7-minute video explaining how to do manage this. However, be aware there are some settings that your tech administrators need to adjust before this will work. I have made a separate video just for the tech admins which can be found in my other blog post on "How to Keep Students from Starting or Recording a Meet".

Now assuming that your tech folks have adjusted the settings they need to change, see below for the video on how you as a teacher can keep students from joining a Meet before you, or after you have left the meeting.

NOTE: If you use Google Classroom, Google has just rolled out a new integration that lets you create a unique Meet link for each of your classes, which you and your students can easily access in Classroom, but your students can't join the Meet without you being there. I have created a video and blog post with all of those directions here: "Google Meet is now integrated in Google Classroom"

How to Keep Students from Starting or Recording a Meet

Google Hangouts Meet is a great tool for remote teaching and learning, but understandably schools may want to limit how students can use this tool. Certainly there are many other apps that students can use to connect with friends, and that is wonderful for them to do so.

However, when being used through school, it is common for schools to not want students to start their own Meets or record a Meet. Thankfully Google has settings that can manage these concerns.

To help with this, I have recorded a short 5-minute video that explains all the settings in the Admin Console that need adjusted to keep students from starting a Meet or recording a Meet.

Note: This video is for the tech administrators. If you are a teacher, I have a separate video on how you can keep students from joining a Meet without you, or rejoining a Meet after you have left, which you can find in my blog post "How to Keep Students from Joining or Rejoining a Google Meet without You".

See below for this quick help video...

How to Create Self-Grading Quizzes in Google Classroom

Google Forms is a fantastic tools for making self-grading assessment for students. Google Classroom is a wonderful way to assign and collect work from students.

Wouldn't it be great to put these two great tools together?

Well, just like the peanut butter and chocolate in a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, Google Forms and Google Classroom work together perfectly to make it easier than ever to create, distribute, and grade assessments in schools.

When you create a quiz through Classroom, many of the needed settings in Google Forms are automatically taken care of for you, there's no need to worry about copying the correct link for the quiz, and the student grades are easily imported right into your Classroom grade book!

See below for a quick 8-minute video that will show you everything you need to know for creating quizzes in Classroom. Then if you want to dig even deeper, I have also included a 1-hour video from a webinar I did a while back that goes into more advanced options and uses of Forms for assessments.