Skip to main content

Google Meet Features Expanding!

Google Meet Breakout Example
This week Google is rolling out several new features for their Enterprise for Education customers. These much awaited features include Breakout rooms and Google Meet Attendance. To learn more about the updated features coming to Google Meet, check out this 30 minute webinar.

If you want to jump into Breakout rooms, check out this guide from Google. It outlines how to create Breakout rooms, join/edit rooms, leave rooms, and end the rooms.

Google Meet attendance is also slowly rolling out to our staff. Google launched this resource last week, then paused the rollout to address some bugs. Over the past week, our staff have been noticing this feature becoming active in their meets. If you don't have it yet, don't worry! It is on its way. Attendance will work automatically for any Meet with more than five participants. To learn more about how Attendance works in Google Meet, check out this post from Google. Please be aware, if you have an extension that does attendance in your Meet, you may want to disable the extension. We find that once Google rolls out a feature to their program it breaks extensions that do the same task.

Finally, Google is adding Polling and Q & A features to your Meets. This will allow you to make your Meets more interactive without having to send your students off to a separate platform. Check out this post on "5 tips for more interactive meetings with Q&A and Polls, rolling out to Google Meet" to learn more.

Popular posts from this blog

Google Docs: Fonts for Early Elementary

Sample of search results from fonts.google.com A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in a training with a bunch of my favorite lower elementary teacher friends, and several of them were lamenting the fact that it is hard to find "good" Google fonts for the little people they work with on a daily basis.  Specifically, it is a challenge to find the single story lower case a and the open 4 .  This conversation, of course, sent me out on a mission to remedy this for these fantastic people.  So, the next day I put on my headphones, turned up the tunes on Spotify, and dived into the website fonts.google.com .  This website lists all the Google fonts available.  It also allows you to type in your own letters and numbers and see them in all the various fonts.  For my purpose, I typed in "abckgy 1234 This is the font."  From here I could see all 877 fonts, and look specifically for the a   and the 4.  It was quite an adventure, and I came across...

It's time to change your password!

There are several times a year when it is important to change your password.  Your password will expire every 90 days. When your windows computer informs you that your password will be expiring soon, CHANGE IT THEN! It is also always a good idea to change your password before going on break so that you do not get locked out of your computer, email or gradebook.  Here is how you change your password from the school windows computers. On your Windows desktop/TEC computer , press the Alt, Ctrl and Delete buttons at the same time. Click on "Change a Password" on the menu below: Enter your username, if needed, and follow the directions on screen. If you are off site or working solely on a Chromebook , you can use the VDI (Virtual Desktop) to change your password.   Simply go to vdi.portageps.org.  Click "VMware Horizon HTML Access."  Click "Accept."  Login with your portage username (leave off the @portageps.org) and password.  Click "Login." ...

Skyward Tech Tip: Modifying Attendance

There are times when a teacher must modify attendance. This tip explains how. Note: Modification of attendance history by teachers is limited to a two week window. Should it be necessary to modify a student’s attendance beyond that window, please contact your building office. Step 1: Navigate to the Take Daily Attendance - By Name From the home screen (Dashboard), Click Teacher Access and choose Post Daily Attendance Choose any class “By Name” Step 2: Scroll to the right to see attendance history Step 3: Choose student/day for which you wish to modify attendance Note: Student Attendance may only be modified by individual student Note: Should you need to modify attendance from the day before, the column appears wider than the others. Locate the student for which you will modify attendance and click in the furthest left region of that cell. You will know you are in the correct location when you cursor changes from the arrow to the pointer hand. Step 4: Ch...