Google on Tuesday announced a number of new features on the go to make virtual education easier, including updates to its Google Meet conference service and a new homework help that just requires a photo of a phone.
For Meet, Google says a larger tiled view that can show up to 49 meeting attendees, which Google first announced in June, will arrive in September now. Google first launched its tiled view for Meet in April with the ability to see 16 participants simultaneously. If you can see 49 people at once, Meet’s gallery will bring up views like the Zooms. Google will also integrate its digital whiteboard product, Jamboard, into Meet in September, and in October, Google will add the ability to remove or replace your background in Meet (a feature it also announced in June).
Customers of G Suite Enterprise for Education can create break-in rooms in Meet starting October, allowing virtual classes to break into smaller group discussions. Also in October, teachers can attend Meetings.
And to meet moderators and educators on the tier G Suite Enterprise for Education to manage classes more easily, Google also announces when they will conduct new moderation checks. Later this month, moderators may stop people from meeting after they have been kicked out of the room or refused to enter twice, which may prevent people from disrupting classes. In September, Google Moderators will end a Meet class for everyone at once, request bulk or requests to join a class, reject meeting in the meeting, restrict who can present in a class, and set up a setting that ‘. t I won a meeting early until the teacher signed her up.
Among some of the other non-Meet updates announced by Google on Tuesday, Google shared new tools to help students learn how to use their phones. For example, students can now visualize nearly 100 concepts in biology, chemistry and other STEM topics by searching for them on Google and then looking at a model of that concept in augmented reality on Android and iOS devices. And Google lets students get help with a homework problem just by taking a picture of it with Google Lens or Google-owned education app Socratic.
If you want to read more about the many training-oriented updates that Google announced Tuesday, check out Google’s roundup here.
