Author Archives: Zach Yeskel

More details on what’s coming to Meet and Classroom

Editor’s note: On August 11, 2020 Google for Education kicked off a global back-to-school event, The Anywhere School. Check out the full recap of product launches and our collection of announcements.

Google has always aimed to invest in products, programs and philanthropy that make learning possible for everyone, anywhere. This year we’ve been especially inspired by the teachers and students around the world who have used our tools in new creative ways and at unprecedented scale. 

As schools start this next semester, we’re excited to share the many new capabilities we’re bringing to Meet and Classroom, to support teaching and learning, no matter where it’s taking place. Let’s start with what’s coming to Meet.

Control for moderators 

Over the next few months, we’re giving moderators of Education meetings more controls for managing their virtual classes. Here are new capabilities, arriving in September, that moderators will have:

  • Prohibit participants from joining meetings after they’ve been ejected or after they’ve been denied entry twice (launching later this month) 
  • End meetings for all participants when class is finished
  • Manage join requests with ease by accepting or rejecting them in bulk
  • Disable in-meeting chat and set restrictions on who can present during a meeting 
  • A setting that requires the teacher to join first

Interactivity in Meet 

Opportunities for interactivity are critical for distance learning and we’re sharing new features to increase engagement with your students virtually:

Launching in September

  • A larger tiled views with a 7x7 grid so you can see up to 49 students at once 

  • A collaborative whiteboard with Jamboard in Meet so you can encourage students to share ideas and try creative approaches to lessons 

Launching in October

  • Blur or replace backgrounds so everyone feels more comfortable during distance-learning classes. Note: Admins can disable custom backgrounds as needed.

  • Attendance tracking to see and track which students attended virtual class (G Suite Enterprise for Education) 

  • Breakout rooms so educators can split classes into simultaneous small group discussions (G Suite Enterprise for Education) 

Launching later this year

  • Hand-raising to help you identify students who may need help or have a question 

  • Q&A features to provide a way for students to ask questions without disrupting the flow of the class discussion or lesson, and polling to engage students to share their voice (G Suite Enterprise for Education) 

New Meet features

New features coming to Meet can help make classes more engaging.

Additionally, we’ll launch temporary recordings later this year, which will be available to all Education customers for free (premium recordings will still be part of G Suite Enterprise for Education). With this new feature, any meeting host can record a meeting and share the recording within their domain for up to 30 days before the video expires. Given disparities in internet access, temporary recordings are intended to help students or meeting participants replay a class or session they couldn't attend live. Temporary recordings cannot be shared outside the host’s domain or downloaded. We’re granting continued free access to premium recordings until temporary recordings are available later this year (note: this is replacing the promotion for access to premium Meet features including live streaming and meetings of up to 250 participants that will be ending on September 30th). 

Now, let’s cover new features you can expect in Classroom.

Helping students and instructors stay on top of their upcoming work

Both students and instructors have risen to the challenge of learning and teaching from home, but it can be tough to stay on top of what they need to do and when. To help instructors and students better discover and track their work in Classroom, the Classes page will soon have a to-do widget for students and a to-review widget for teachers.

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New, easier ways to join classes

In addition to sharing course join codes, educators can now share a link to join classes with a single click. Link-sharing allows educators to share classes anywhere they communicate with students, including in messaging platforms such as WhatsApp.

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Spot missed citations with enhanced originality reports

Originality reports, which are built into Classroom and Assignments, provide educators with flags for potential plagiarism in student work and also help students quickly identify passages that may need citations. Now, we’re making originality reports even more helpful.

First, we’re raising the number of originality reports that educators can use per class from three to five. (Educators with G Suite Enterprise for Education licenses will continue to get unlimited originality reports.) Educators will also be able to print, save and download reports to share with students, parents and administrators. Soon educators and students will be able to run originality reports on Google Slides, in addition to Google Docs, as well as in multiple languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Indonesian and Italian.

Check for potential plagiarism between students 

Traditionally, originality reports have surfaced matches for potential plagiarism against hundreds of billions of web pages and over 40 million books. Now, instructors with G Suite Enterprise for Education licenses will be able to see potential plagiarism between students at their school. Starting in a few weeks, originality reports will check submissions against a private, school-owned repository of past student work to look for student-to-student matches. Student submissions are automatically added when instructors use originality reports in Classroom. If admins want to actively manage the repository, they can manually add files or remove documents directly. Google never has access to or the ability to use this repository—it’s owned and used solely by the school domain.

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More visibility and tools for Classroom admins

Coming soon, we’re rolling out additional tools for adminswho want to troubleshoot Classroom issues or gain deeper insights into usage across their domain. For example, all Education admins will now have access to Classroom audit logs, and admins with an Enterprise license will also be able to export their logs to BigQuery or create a customizable dashboard on Data Studio to see a slate of engagement metrics.

Classroom now available in additional languages

With Classroom usage quickly growing around the world, we’re making it accessible to more learners in their native language. We’ll be launching Classroom in 10 additional Indian languages. Soon Classroom will support over 54 languages globally; with even more coming in the future.

More support from partners

With the new features in Google Classroom, you’ll also see that many apps are also launching new features that make their tools easy to use alongside Classroom. Explore these apps to learn how teachers and students can continue to stay organized, interactive, and collaborative with Classroom: Canva, Nearpod, Screencastify, Achieve3000 and Adobe, to name a few.

Classroom features coming soon

In the coming month, we will provide a more detailed roadmap to help education leaders and teachers understand and prepare for other improvements that will launch to Classroom throughout the school year.  Here’s a sneak peek at some of the specific areas we’ll be working on:

  • Student engagement metrics: Educators will be able to see stats that help track how students are interacting in Google Classroom each day.

  • Deeper integration with other teaching tools. With Classroom now playing a role as “mission control” for many classes, we'll enable more seamless integrations with the content and learning tools schools are using alongside Google’s tools.

  • Mobile offline improvements. We know that home and mobile internet connections aren’t always available or reliable, so we’re working to update the Classroom mobile apps to work much better even with intermittent connectivity.

Integrated admin capabilities for deploying and managing Classroom. Provisioning classes for an entire school system can be time-consuming, especially given the scale of many of our customers. We’re building integrated tools to make it easier to create and manage courses at scale.

If we can’t all physically be together in our schools this year, we’re committed to making Classroom and Meet even better to bring everyone together online. Please continue to share your feedback, and we’ll keep adapting our tools to meet your evolving needs.

How G Suite for Education protects teacher and student privacy

From it’s start 13 years ago, G Suite for Education has provided accredited schools and universities around the world with collaboration and teaching tools that are easy to use and manage, and protect student data. Our team works closely with school leaders and educators to continuously improve our tools and empower them with more engaging and effective ways to teach and learn—anytime, anywhere, on any device. And with many more schools now using G Suite for Education, we want to answer some common questions about our approach to security and privacy. 

What’s included in G Suite for Education

G Suite for Education offers two categories of services: G Suite Core Services and Additional Services. G Suite Core Services include products like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Forms, Slides, Meet, and Classroom, which helps educators easily distribute assignments, grade and send feedback, and communicate with students in one place. Additional Services, like Google Books, Google Earth and Google Search, are designed for consumer users and can be used with G Suite for Education accounts if enabled by a school’s domain administrator, after obtaining parental consent where appropriate.

We keep teacher and student data secure 

Schools own their G Suite for Education data, and it’s Google’s responsibility to keep it safe and secure. Our systems and data centers are among the industry’s most secure and G Suite for Education data gets the same multi-layer safeguards that Google uses for our own operations. Our engineers work around the clock to ensure the security of our products and quickly respond to any threats that may emerge. We also provide all G Suite for Education administrators with extensive security capabilities to protect sensitive information, including Data Loss Prevention. For customers interested in enhanced security capabilities, please check out G Suite Enterprise for Education.

G Suite for Education provides school-managed Google accounts specifically for students, faculty and staff. School administrators can delete their entire domain, delete specific accounts at any time, or export their data at any time. If a school decides to stop using G Suite for Education, all their user accounts and G Suite customer data will be deleted. When users graduate or move to a different school, we provide a Takeout tool students can use to take their data with them. 

If you’re a parent or guardian of a student in primary or secondary school (K-12), you can access your child’s personal information or request that it be deleted through the school administrator. If a parent wishes to stop any further collection or use of the child's information, the parent can request that the school administrator limit the child’s access to features or services, or delete the child’s account entirely. For schools looking for more information about how to communicate with parents and guardians about G Suite for Education, check out this resource.

We don’t allow ads in G Suite for Education Core Services

There are no ads in G Suite for Education’s Core Services. For G Suite for Education users in primary and secondary (K-12) schools, Google does not use any user personal information (or any information associated with the G Suite for Education account) to target ads.

Additional Services (like YouTube, Maps, and Blogger) that are designed for consumers can also be used with G Suite for Education accounts for primary and secondary schools (K-12), if the school’s domain administrator enables access to the services. In that circumstance, these services may show contextual ads, but personal information (or any information associated with the account) is not used to target advertising.

We comply with industry regulations and best practices

G Suite for Education supports compliance with privacy laws around the world like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). We also signed the Student Privacy Pledge in connection with G Suite for Education Core Services so that educators and parents would know that we follow industry-leading practices. 

G Suite for Education’s commitment to privacy and security helps educators and school leaders create a healthy and safe teaching environment, all while making learning productive and collaborative. To learn more, we encourage you to visit our Privacy & Security Center and our G Suite for Education Privacy Notice. And if you’re a parent or guardian looking for information about how you can keep your family safe online, even outside of school, visit our Family Safety Center.

New Meet features to improve distance learning

Our team has been so inspired by the remarkable work of educators and school leaders around the world, who continue to adapt as schools shift to remote learning. Today, 120 million students and educators are using G Suite for Education worldwide to create, collaborate and communicate despite school closures. With this increase in usage, one consistent theme we’ve heard is that educators are looking for ways to continue teaching and collaborating in a virtual environment that is safe and secure. We’re sharing some ways we’re making Google Meet, a core service of G Suite for Education, work even betterfor schools.

Extension of access to premium Google Meet features

In order to support ongoing institutional needs, we've extended access to premium Meet features at no cost for all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users until September 30, 2020. This means you can have meetings for up to 250 participants per call, live streams for up to 100,000 viewers within your domain, and record meetings and save them to Google Drive. 

Better together: Using Google Meet inside Classroom

More than 100 million students and educators worldwide are now using Classroom. To make it easier to have classes remotely, we’re integrating Classroom and Meet, putting both tools in one place.

Educators can create a unique Meet link for each class, which is displayed on the Classroom Stream and Classwork pages. The link acts as a dedicated meeting space for each class, making it easy for both teachers and students to join.

The Meet links created by the Classroom integration are nicknamed meetings. For education users, participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left, unless they have meeting creation privileges to start a new meeting. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join again until an instructor restarts the nicknamed meeting.

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To use this integration, school administrators need to turn on Meet for their domain. Administrators can grant meeting creationprivileges to individuals or groups, and we recommend that you assign creation privileges to the organizational units (OUs) that contain your faculty and staff members, which means that students will only be able to join meetings created by faculty or staff.

How Google Meet keeps your video conferences protected

With Meet, institutions can take advantage of the same secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network that Google uses to secure your information. Meet includes protections to safeguard student and educator privacy, including:

  • Meet adheres to IETF security standards for Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP).

  • In Meet, all data is encrypted in transit by default between the client and Google for video meetings on a web browser, on the Android and iOS apps, and in meeting rooms with Google meeting room hardware.

  • Each Meeting ID is 10 characters long, with 25 characters in the set, so it’s difficult to make an unauthorized attempt to join the meeting by guessing the ID. 

  • To limit the attack surface and eliminate the need to push out frequent security patches, Meet works entirely in your browser. This means we do not require or ask for any plugins or software to be installed if you use Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge. On mobile, we recommend that you install the Meet app. 

  • Supporting compliance requirements around regulations including COPPA, FERPA, GDPR, and HIPAA.


For tips and best practices for admins on securely deploying Meet to your education domain, visit the Meet security and privacy for education page.

New Google Meet features to help educators keep meetings safe 

We're rolling out additional features today to all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users to give educators control over their meetings, making them more secure:

  • Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other participants. This ensures that instructors can't be removed or muted by student participants.

  • Only meeting creators and calendar owners can approve requests to join made by participants outside of the school’s domain. This means that students can’t allow external participants to join via video and that external participants can’t join before the instructor.

  • Meeting participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join again until an instructor restarts the nicknamed meeting.

For educators wanting to learn more about Meet and how to use it with their students, we recommend checking out Teach From Home, a hub for distance learning resources.