PPS Instructional Technology

  USING BREAKOUT ROOMS IN GOOGLE MEET So what are Breakout Rooms? Simply put, Breakout rooms are the ability to section your students into smaller groups within your video-conferencing software. Basically small groups in digital form! But… how can you do it? CREATE BREAKOUT ROOMS On your computer, start a Google Meet.  In the top right, click Activities     Breakout rooms. In the Breakout rooms panel, choose the number of breakout rooms. You can create up to 100 breakout rooms in a call.  Students are then distributed across the rooms. To manually move students into different rooms, you can: Enter the participant’s name directly into a breakout room. Click the participant’s name. Hold down the mouse, drag the name, and then drop it into another breakout room.  To randomly mix up the groups again, click Shuffle  . In the bottom right, click "Open rooms". EDIT, JOIN, or LEAVE BREAKOUT ROOMS Once you’ve created breakout rooms, you can make chang...

We are all spending a lot of time presenting in Google Meets these days. Check out this doc for tips on the following topics: Increasing Pointer Size Highlighting your Pointer Increasing the size of your Doc Split Screen Extended Screen Join a Meet only to Present

As we use Google Meet more and more, there are little quirks that it helps to be aware of when working with your students.  Here are a few helpful Meet tips. A Student Can't Get Back into the Meet If you remove a student from a Meet for any reason, then you will need to invite them back at your next meeting, otherwise they will not be able to participate. To invite students back into the meet follow these steps: On the right, click People > Add people . Enter the name or email address Send invite. Here is a quick image to help you with this process: Google Meet Breakout Rooms Error When using the Google Meet Breakout Room feature and a student gets an error about an unsupported device or personal account or it just kicks them out when they try to go to the breakout room, then they are likely attempting to use the Google Meet Android App on their chromebook. Breakout rooms are only supported in the web-based version of Meet. The solution is to uninstall the android app...

As educators, it is extremely important for us to maintain a safe environment for our students. That importance applies equally to their physical AND mental needs. For those reasons, I was ecstatic when Google Meet developed its Host Controls and Meeting Security features. Today, we will learn how to use the controls to allow participants to join a call as well as how the host can remove users for any reason necessary. Ok, how do you get to the Host and Safety controls? From within Google Meet, navigate to the bottom to the Meeting Controls and Menu toolbar. Locate the Blue Security Shield. Click on the Shield to open the Host and Safety controls. Limiting Access to Your Meeting The topmost option is Quick access . The default is to allow anyone to join your Meet. (Note that Nicknamed Meet sessions will only allow participants from inside your organization to enter automatically. Anyone calling* in or with an email address outside of Portage Public Schools must be admitted manually.) T...

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 Me...