Tag Archives: G Suite

A is for accessibility: How to make remote learning work for everyone

Editor’s note: Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and we’ll be sharing resources and tools for education, as well as accessibility features and updates for Android and Google Maps. 

When it comes to equity and access in education, nothing is more important than making sure  our digital tools are accessible to all learners—especially now as distance learning becomes the norm. I’m a proud member of the disability community, and I come from a family of special education teachers and paraprofessionals. So I’ve seen firsthand how creative educators and digital tools can elevate the learning experience for students with disabilities. It’s been amazing to see how tools like select-to-speak help students improve reading comprehension as they listen while reading along or assist students who have low vision. And tools like voice typing in Docs can greatly benefit students who have physical disabilities that limit their ability to use a keyboard.

This Global Accessibility Awareness DayI'm reminded of how far we’ve come in sharing inclusive tools for people with different abilities. But it doesn’t stop there. Everyday we strive to make our products and tools more inclusive for every learner, everywhere.

Applying technology to accessibility challenges

At Google, we’re always focused on how we can use new technologies, like artificial intelligence, to broaden digital accessibility. Since everyone learns in different ways, we’ve  built tools and features right into our products, like G Suite for Education and Chromebooks,  that can adapt to a range of needs and learning styles. For learners who are Deaf, hard of hearing, or need extra support to focus, you can turn on live captions in Google Slides and in  Google Meet. On Chromebooks, students have access to built-in tools, like screen readers, including ChromeVox and Select-to-speak, and Chromebook apps and extensions from EdTech companies like Don Johnston, Grackle Docs, Crick Software, Scanning Pens and Text Help, with distance learning solutions on the Chromebook App Hub. 

As more students learn from home, we’ve seen how features like these have helped students learn in ways that work best for them.

Helping all students shine during distance learning

Educators and students around the world are using Google tools to make learning more inclusive and accessible. Whether that’s using Sheets to make to-do lists for students, sharing the built-in magnification tools in Chromebooks to help those who are visually impaired, or using voice typing in Google Docs to dictate lesson plans or essays. 

In Portage Public Schools in Portage, Michigan, teachers are taking advantage of accessibility features in Meet to help all of their students learn at their own pace.  They use live captioning in Meet so that students who are Deaf or hard of hearing can follow along with the lesson. And with the ability to record and save meetings, every student can refer back to the material if they need to.  

In Daegu, South Korea, about 100 teachers worked together to quickly build an e-learning content hub that included tools for special education students, such as Meet, Classroom and Translate. “In the epidemic situation, it was very clear that students in special education were placed in the blind spot of learning,” said one Daegu teacher. But thanks to digital accessibility features that were shared with students and parents, the teacher said, “I saw hope.” 

live captions in Meet.gif

Accessibility resources for schools

At a time when digital tools are creating the  connection between students, classmates, and teachers, we need to prioritize accessibility so that no student is left behind. The good news is that support and tools are readily available for parents, guardians, educators and students:

Your stories of how technology is making learning accessible for more learners during COVID-19 help us and so many others learn new use cases. Please share how you're using accessibility tools and requests for how we can continue to meet the needs of more learners.

10 things to know to get started with Google Classroom

For so many educators-- from tech beginners to tech wizards—the past few months have been a crash course in distance learning, following COVID-19 school closures. Just about every educator is learning the ins and outs of distance learning. If you’re a teacher testing various digital tools for your distance learning program, this is a good time to tryGoogle Classroom, which can help you manage assignments, grade work, and give students feedback—just as you’ve done in your classrooms at school.

Animated video showing Google Classroom

Below is a step-by-step guide for getting started with Classroom:

 1. Teachers and students need G Suite for Education accounts to use Google Classroom; your G Suite administrator will need toset up accounts for your school if necessary.  While anyone with a Gmail account can create a Google Classroom, such as those using it for personal use, if you are using Google Classroom in a school setting, you must use a G Suite for Education account. G Suite for Education accounts let schools decide which Google services their students can use, and provides additional privacy and security protections that are important in a school setting. You can alsoget the Classroom app for Android, iOS, and Chrome OS devices.

2. Create a class. Each Google Classroom is a space where your students can receive assignments and read your announcements. Head toclassroom.google.com to get started—you’ll have your class up and running in no time.

3. Invite students to your classroom in order to enroll them. You’ll do this by way of email invitation or code.

4. Set up a grading system and grade categories. You can choose a “Total Points” or “Weighted by Category” grading system, and your grades will be calculated for you. If you opt for no grading system, choose “No Overall Grade,” and grades will not be calculated. With grade categories, you can organize classwork (essays, homework, and tests, for example). If you choose not to set a grading system, you can still use Classroom to share materials and engage your students.

5. Create assignments, and organize materials by topics.  You can post assignments to multiple classes as well as to individual students. You cangive feedback on assignments,grade and return assignments, andreuse assignments. You can also add a Question on the Classwork page as a quick and easy way to take attendance, especially while class is virtual. 

6. Create quizzes, import quiz grades, and return grades to students.

7. Set up live online classes. Keep kids engaged and foster a feeling of connection and community with video conferencing using Google Meet right from Classroom. You can also set updigital office hours.

Google Meet in Google Classroom

8. Find outhow to help students with low or no internet bandwidth at home.

9. For students who are blind or low-vision, they can use a screen reader with Classroom - teachers can learn more here. And there are many accessibility features built into G Suite for Education tools that all work with Classroom.

10. Get the support you need. At any point, you can reach out to a community of teachers for tips on how to engage your students and stay motivated yourself.Teach From Home has resources that can help you stay connected with your colleagues, trade stories over virtual coffee breaks, and share teaching resources and strategies.

 For more help, check outthis training on the Teacher Center, and stay up to date on distance-learning strategies with Google’s Education blog.

10 things to know to get started with Google Classroom

For so many educators-- from tech beginners to tech wizards—the past few months have been a crash course in distance learning, following COVID-19 school closures. Just about every educator is learning the ins and outs of distance learning. If you’re a teacher testing various digital tools for your distance learning program, this is a good time to tryGoogle Classroom, which can help you manage assignments, grade work, and give students feedback—just as you’ve done in your classrooms at school.

Animated video showing Google Classroom

Below is a step-by-step guide for getting started with Classroom:

 1. Teachers and students need G Suite for Education accounts to use Google Classroom; your G Suite administrator will need toset up accounts for your school if necessary.  While anyone with a Gmail account can create a Google Classroom, such as those using it for personal use, if you are using Google Classroom in a school setting, you must use a G Suite for Education account. G Suite for Education accounts let schools decide which Google services their students can use, and provides additional privacy and security protections that are important in a school setting. You can alsoget the Classroom app for Android, iOS, and Chrome OS devices.

2. Create a class. Each Google Classroom is a space where your students can receive assignments and read your announcements. Head toclassroom.google.com to get started—you’ll have your class up and running in no time.

3. Invite students to your classroom in order to enroll them. You’ll do this by way of email invitation or code.

4. Set up a grading system and grade categories. You can choose a “Total Points” or “Weighted by Category” grading system, and your grades will be calculated for you. If you opt for no grading system, choose “No Overall Grade,” and grades will not be calculated. With grade categories, you can organize classwork (essays, homework, and tests, for example). If you choose not to set a grading system, you can still use Classroom to share materials and engage your students.

5. Create assignments, and organize materials by topics.  You can post assignments to multiple classes as well as to individual students. You cangive feedback on assignments,grade and return assignments, andreuse assignments. You can also add a Question on the Classwork page as a quick and easy way to take attendance, especially while class is virtual. 

6. Create quizzes, import quiz grades, and return grades to students.

7. Set up live online classes. Keep kids engaged and foster a feeling of connection and community with video conferencing using Google Meet right from Classroom. You can also set updigital office hours.

Google Meet in Google Classroom

8. Find outhow to help students with low or no internet bandwidth at home.

9. For students who are blind or low-vision, they can use a screen reader with Classroom - teachers can learn more here. And there are many accessibility features built into G Suite for Education tools that all work with Classroom.

10. Get the support you need. At any point, you can reach out to a community of teachers for tips on how to engage your students and stay motivated yourself.Teach From Home has resources that can help you stay connected with your colleagues, trade stories over virtual coffee breaks, and share teaching resources and strategies.

 For more help, check outthis training on the Teacher Center, and stay up to date on distance-learning strategies with Google’s Education blog.

Google Meet is here to host your video meetings, for free

When I joined Google last year to lead G Suite, I couldn’t have imagined how the world was about to change. But in a few short months, working together took on a whole new meaning, and meetings became about so much more than getting things done. From doctor check-up meetings, to meetings with financial advisors, to study meetings, workout meetings, and birthday meetings. They may not look or feel like traditional meetings, but they’re the most important meetings happening right now.

That’s why we’ve re-engineered Google Meet, originally built for secure business meetings, to make it free and available to all. Since making Meet's advanced features free for all G Suite and G Suite for Education users in March, we've seen daily usage grow by 30x, with Meet hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings daily. Last month, we were adding roughly 3 million new users every day. That's why we're expanding the offering to more people around the world.

Now that the rollout we announced two weeks ago is complete, anyone with an email address can sign up and get started at meet.google.com, for free. And to make meetings even more accessible and helpful, in the coming days you’ll also be able to use Meet directly in Gmail.

  • Gmail 1 Meet in Gmail highlight.png
  • [Gmail]-2.-Start-a-meeting-v3_kw.gif
  • [Gmail]-3-Join-a-meeting-v3_kw.gif

Click “Start a meeting" and a new window opens with a unique, secure meeting for you to join and then share with others. You can also easily join meetings shared with you by entering a meeting code. And you can plan video meetings and invite others directly from Google Calendar.

Because video meetings have never been more important, we’ve been fast-tracking the most requested features for Meet, and are now making them available to all. Anyone can use Meet’s simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view—all built on Google’s secure, reliable global infrastructure. Speaking from my own experience, the new features in Meet are already making our team (and my family) meetings better. We love how tiled view makes us feel more connected—and the occasional surprise visits from kids and family pets! 

And we’re continuing to look for ways to make Google Meet more accessible and useful. For example, we know video meetings can be challenging to follow for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, which is why we made sure AI-powered automatic live captioning was available to everyone. One of the most meaningful emails I’ve received was from a parent whose child was able to feel more included thanks to live captioning. Google AI has also made it possible to provide helpful features like low-light mode, which can automatically adjust your video to make you more visible to others.

Meet is available for free for everyone at meet.google.com and on iOS or Android. If you have an existing Google Account (for example, if you’re a @gmail.com user), you can sign in at meet.google.com to get started. If you don’t have a free Google Account, it only takes a minute to create one using your work or personal email address of choice (we require this step as a security measure, and you’ll only need to do this once). Or look for Meet right in Gmail.  

We hope Meet will help you connect to all your important meetings—from work meetings, to graduation meetings, to wedding meetings, and everything in between.

Source: Gmail Blog


Google Meet is here to host your video meetings, for free

When I joined Google last year to lead G Suite, I couldn’t have imagined how the world was about to change. But in a few short months, working together took on a whole new meaning, and meetings became about so much more than getting things done. From doctor check-up meetings, to meetings with financial advisors, to study meetings, workout meetings, and birthday meetings. They may not look or feel like traditional meetings, but they’re the most important meetings happening right now.

That’s why we’ve re-engineered Google Meet, originally built for secure business meetings, to make it free and available to all. Since making Meet's advanced features free for all G Suite and G Suite for Education users in March, we've seen daily usage grow by 30x, with Meet hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings daily. Last month, we were adding roughly 3 million new users every day. That's why we're expanding the offering to more people around the world.

Now that the rollout we announced two weeks ago is complete, anyone with an email address can sign up and get started at meet.google.com, for free. And to make meetings even more accessible and helpful, in the coming days you’ll also be able to use Meet directly in Gmail.

  • Gmail 1 Meet in Gmail highlight.png
  • [Gmail]-2.-Start-a-meeting-v3_kw.gif
  • [Gmail]-3-Join-a-meeting-v3_kw.gif

Click “Start a meeting" and a new window opens with a unique, secure meeting for you to join and then share with others. You can also easily join meetings shared with you by entering a meeting code. And you can plan video meetings and invite others directly from Google Calendar.

Because video meetings have never been more important, we’ve been fast-tracking the most requested features for Meet, and are now making them available to all. Anyone can use Meet’s simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view—all built on Google’s secure, reliable global infrastructure. Speaking from my own experience, the new features in Meet are already making our team (and my family) meetings better. We love how tiled view makes us feel more connected—and the occasional surprise visits from kids and family pets! 

And we’re continuing to look for ways to make Google Meet more accessible and useful. For example, we know video meetings can be challenging to follow for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, which is why we made sure AI-powered automatic live captioning was available to everyone. One of the most meaningful emails I’ve received was from a parent whose child was able to feel more included thanks to live captioning. Google AI has also made it possible to provide helpful features like low-light mode, which can automatically adjust your video to make you more visible to others.

Meet is available for free for everyone at meet.google.com and on iOS or Android. If you have an existing Google Account (for example, if you’re a @gmail.com user), you can sign in at meet.google.com to get started. If you don’t have a free Google Account, it only takes a minute to create one using your work or personal email address of choice (we require this step as a security measure, and you’ll only need to do this once). Or look for Meet right in Gmail.  

We hope Meet will help you connect to all your important meetings—from work meetings, to graduation meetings, to wedding meetings, and everything in between.

Source: Gmail Blog


Google Meet is here to host your video meetings, for free

When I joined Google last year to lead G Suite, I couldn’t have imagined how the world was about to change. But in a few short months, working together took on a whole new meaning, and meetings became about so much more than getting things done. From doctor check-up meetings, to meetings with financial advisors, to study meetings, workout meetings, and birthday meetings. They may not look or feel like traditional meetings, but they’re the most important meetings happening right now.

That’s why we’ve re-engineered Google Meet, originally built for secure business meetings, to make it free and available to all. Since making Meet's advanced features free for all G Suite and G Suite for Education users in March, we've seen daily usage grow by 30x, with Meet hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings daily. Last month, we were adding roughly 3 million new users every day. That's why we're expanding the offering to more people around the world.

Now that the rollout we announced two weeks ago is complete, anyone with an email address can sign up and get started at meet.google.com, for free. And to make meetings even more accessible and helpful, in the coming days you’ll also be able to use Meet directly in Gmail.

  • Gmail 1 Meet in Gmail highlight.png
  • [Gmail]-2.-Start-a-meeting-v3_kw.gif
  • [Gmail]-3-Join-a-meeting-v3_kw.gif

Click “Start a meeting" and a new window opens with a unique, secure meeting for you to join and then share with others. You can also easily join meetings shared with you by entering a meeting code. And you can plan video meetings and invite others directly from Google Calendar.

Because video meetings have never been more important, we’ve been fast-tracking the most requested features for Meet, and are now making them available to all. Anyone can use Meet’s simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view—all built on Google’s secure, reliable global infrastructure. Speaking from my own experience, the new features in Meet are already making our team (and my family) meetings better. We love how tiled view makes us feel more connected—and the occasional surprise visits from kids and family pets! 

And we’re continuing to look for ways to make Google Meet more accessible and useful. For example, we know video meetings can be challenging to follow for those with hearing loss, which is why we made sure AI-powered automatic live captioning was available to everyone. One of the most meaningful emails I’ve received was from a parent whose child was able to feel more included thanks to live captioning. Google AI has also made it possible to provide helpful features like low-light mode, which can automatically adjust your video to make you more visible to others.

Meet is available for free for everyone at meet.google.com and on iOS or Android. If you have an existing Google Account (for example, if you’re a @gmail.com user), you can sign in at meet.google.com to get started. If you don’t have a free Google Account, it only takes a minute to create one using your work or personal email address of choice (we require this step as a security measure, and you’ll only need to do this once). Or look for Meet right in Gmail.  

We hope Meet will help you connect to all your important meetings—from work meetings, to graduation meetings, to wedding meetings, and everything in between.

Connecting and collaborating with Google Meet & G Suite

In this unprecedented time in history, we’ve seen millions of businesses across India adapt to the new normal of working remotely and learning from home. It is human nature to connect, and video conferencing plays a pivotal role here. 
We saw more than 3 million new users connecting on Google Meet every day as of this month, spending over 3 billion minutes a day together. That’s a massive 30x jump from the numbers we saw earlier in January. And today, we’re making our premium video conferencing tool, Google Meet free for everyone, with availability rolling out over the coming weeks. 
Stay home, stay safe, stay connected 
Starting May, anyone with an email address can create a Google Account and use Meet to schedule, join or start secure video meetings with anyone — whether it’s a virtual dance class, a weekly book club, neighborhood meetings, or any other reason to connect with your community, friends, and family. 
Until today, Google Meet was only available as part of G Suite, our collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organizations and schools. Now, it is freely available on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android. And if you use Google Calendar, you can easily start or join from there too. 
We’re also rolling out new features including tiled layout for larger calls, the option to present a Chrome tab (instead of just presenting their window or entire screen), low-light mode and eventually noise cancellation. 
Secure by design
Meet is designed, built and operated to be secure at scale — for everyone. We employ a vast array of safe-by-default measures to keep your meetings safe without doing a thing, everytime. We don't require or ask for any plugins to be installed, reducing the amount of software users and businesses need to patch with security updates on their machines. 
We also ensure that only authorised users can use and access Meet services by using a 2-Step Verification option for account — making them secure and convenient. Google Meet users can enroll their accounts in our Advanced Protection Program (APP), which provides our strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking, and is specifically designed for the highest-risk accounts.
Helping businesses collaborate with G Suite
We’re not just connecting over video. We’ve also seen huge spikes in the use of our entire G Suite offering as more people create, share, and connect together while working remotely. Earlier this year we marked another major milestone — surpassing six million paying businesses and organisations who use G Suite. 
“Employees are able to access every business application via Google Cloud Platform and continue to communicate as usual not only between themselves but also with customers, vendors and other stakeholders with G Suite. The Google Cloud team is always accessible and supportive to help us ease things. The use of collaborative tools has facilitated important human contact and responsiveness in an unprecedented time of remote work,” said V M Samir, Group CIO, Rustomjee, a leading real estate company in Mumbai.
Mathan Babu Kasilingam, CISO of National Payments Corporation of India, an umbrella organisation for all retail payment systems in India says, “Google Meet has played a good role in helping our teams stay connected. It’s great to see that it is possible to work across various remote locations and manage to carry on business as usual through video conferencing.” 
Here is what TR Chadha & Co, one of India’s prominent chartered accountancy firms, had to say. “G Suite has been a lifeline for the teams for the past month since we have transitioned to a work from home set-up due to the pandemic. With G Suite, our teams can securely log-in from any device to work wherever they are at any time,” said Gautam Kumar, IT Manager, TR Chadha.
Securely stay connected and productive not just today but also in the future
We’re carefully rolling out Meet incrementally over the coming weeks to ensure we can provide everyone with the reliability and security they expect from Google. This means you might not be able to create meetings right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.
Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we will not enforce this time limit until after September 30.  Creating a trusted meeting space is important, so being mindful when sharing meeting links in public forums can help create a safe experience for all attendees. For more tips on how to use Meet securely and effectively, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, Google Cloud India

Google Meet premium video conferencing—free for everyone

Technology that connects us while we're apart helps keep us safe and productive. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the power of video meetings bring us together—whether we’re working with teammates, talking to healthcare professionals, sharing with loved ones, or learning from home. 

Today, we’re making Google Meet, our premium video conferencing product, free for everyone, with availability rolling out over the coming weeks. We’ve invested years in making Meet a secure and reliable video conferencing solution that’s trusted by schools, governments and enterprises around the world, and in recent months we’veaccelerated the release of top-requested features to make it even more helpful. Starting in early May, anyone with an email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the same features available to our business and education users, such as simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view. 

It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.

MeetInGmail-Telehealth-1779x1095.jpg

Meet operates on a secure foundation, keeping users safe, data secure, and information private—including between patients and caregivers.

Video meetings built on a secure foundation

Meet is designed, built and operated to be secure at scale. Since January, we’ve seen Meet’s peak daily usage grow by 30x. As of this month, Meet is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. And as of last week, Meet’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million. With this growth comes great responsibility. Privacy and security are paramount, no matter if it’s a doctor sharing confidential health information with a patient, a financial advisor hosting a client meeting, or people virtually connecting with each other for graduations, holidays and happy hours.

Our approach to security is simple: make products safe by default. We designed Meet to operate on a secure foundation, providing the protections needed to keep our users safe, their data secure, and their information private. Here are just a few of our default-on safety measures:

  • We provide a strong set of host controls such as the ability to admit or deny entry to a meeting, and mute or remove participants, if needed. 

  • We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. 

  • Meet meeting codes are complex by default and therefore resilient to brute-force “guessing.”

  • Meet video meetings are encrypted in transit, and all recordings stored in Google Drive are encrypted in transit and at rest.

  • We don’t require plugins to use Meet on the web. It works entirely in Chrome and other modern browsers, so it’s less vulnerable to security threats.

  • On mobile, we have dedicated Google Meet apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. 

  • Meet users can enroll their account in Google’s Advanced Protection Program—our strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking.

  • Google Cloud undergoes regular rigorous security and privacy audits for all its services. Our global compliance certifications can help support regulatory requirements such as GDPR and HIPAA, as well as COPPA and FERPA for education. 

  • Your Meet data is not used for advertising, and we don't sell your data to third parties.

We operate a highly secure and resilient private network that encircles the globe and connects our data centers to each other—ensuring that your data stays safe. Trust is built on transparency and we publish the locations of all our data centers. You can learn more about how Meet keeps your video meetings safe in this post.

Free Google Meet accounts for individuals

You can use Meet to schedule, join or start secure video meetings with anyone—for a virtual yoga class, weekly book club, neighborhood meeting, or happy hour with friends. Until now, Meet has only been available as part of G Suite, our collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organizations and schools. Going forward, Meet will be available to anyone for free on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android. And if you use Google Calendar, you’ll be able to easily start or join from there, too.
Google Meet - Create-New-Meeting_gb.gif

Use your existing Google Account to start a secure meeting in Google Meet

If you have an existing Google Account (for example, if you’re a @gmail.com user), sign in at meet.google.com to get started. If you don’t have a free Google Account, it only takes a minute to create one using your work or personal email address of choice (we require this step as a security measure, and you’ll only need to do this once).

Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we won’t enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30. Creating a trusted meeting space is important, and being mindful when sharing meeting links in public forums can help create a safe experience for all attendees. For more tips on how to use Meet securely and effectively, visit our Help Center. 

Google Meet for groups and teams

Groups within an organization can also use Meet to create video meetings that help coworkers connect one-on-one, collaborate as a team, and more. For organizations that aren’t already G Suite customers, today we’re announcing G Suite Essentials. G Suite Essentials is perfect for teams that need access to Meet’s more advanced features, such as dial-in phone numbers, larger meetings, and meeting recording. G Suite Essentials also includes Google Drive for easy and secure access to all of a team’s content, and Docs, Sheets and Slides for content creation and real-time collaboration. 

Through Sept. 30, we’re providing G Suite Essentials and all of these advanced features free of charge. If you’re interested in G Suite Essentials, complete this form to get in touch with our sales team. 

Google Meet for businesses and organizations

Whether it’s hospitals supporting patients via telehealth, banks working with loan applicants, retailers assisting customers remotely, or manufacturers interacting safely with warehouse technicians, businesses across every industry are using Meet to stay connected. If you’re one of the 6 million companies and organizations that use G Suite to power remote productivity, you already have access to Meet. Admins simply need to enable Meet by following instructions outlined on our Help Center. In the spirit of being helpful during this time, we’re providing three ways for new and current enterprise customers to access Meet through Sept. 30: 

  • Free access to Meet’s advanced features for all G Suite customers, such as the ability to live stream for up to 100,000 viewers within your domain.

  • Free additional Meet licenses for existing G Suite customers without any amendments to their current contract.

  • Free G Suite Essentials for enterprise customers. 

Enterprises can get in touch with our sales team to learn more.
Meet - Live captions.jpg

Google Meet includes live captions powered by Google’s speech recognition technology

Google Meet in schools and higher-ed institutions

Many schools and colleges today use Meet to power secure virtual classes, PTA meetings, parent-teacher conferences, tutoring, and even school socials. Meet is included in G Suite for Education, which serves more than 120 million students and teachers globally. If your school already uses G Suite for Education, your administrator can enable Meet at no additional cost. If your school doesn’t use G Suite for Education, you can sign up here. To access resources for distance learning, visit Teach from Home.

Our hope is that by making Meet and G Suite more readily available for all, it will be easier to securely stay connected and productive—now and in the future.

Google Meet premium video conferencing—free for everyone

Technology that connects us while we're apart helps keep us safe and productive. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the power of video meetings bring us together—whether we’re working with teammates, talking to healthcare professionals, sharing with loved ones, or learning from home. 

Today, we’re making Google Meet, our premium video conferencing product, free for everyone, with availability rolling out over the coming weeks. We’ve invested years in making Meet a secure and reliable video conferencing solution that’s trusted by schools, governments and enterprises around the world, and in recent months we’veaccelerated the release of top-requested features to make it even more helpful. Starting in early May, anyone with an email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the same features available to our business and education users, such as simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view. 

It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.

MeetInGmail-Telehealth-1779x1095.jpg

Meet operates on a secure foundation, keeping users safe, data secure, and information private—including between patients and caregivers.

Video meetings built on a secure foundation

Meet is designed, built and operated to be secure at scale. Since January, we’ve seen Meet’s peak daily usage grow by 30x. As of this month, Meet is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. And as of last week, Meet’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million. With this growth comes great responsibility. Privacy and security are paramount, no matter if it’s a doctor sharing confidential health information with a patient, a financial advisor hosting a client meeting, or people virtually connecting with each other for graduations, holidays and happy hours.

Our approach to security is simple: make products safe by default. We designed Meet to operate on a secure foundation, providing the protections needed to keep our users safe, their data secure, and their information private. Here are just a few of our default-on safety measures:

  • We provide a strong set of host controls such as the ability to admit or deny entry to a meeting, and mute or remove participants, if needed. 

  • We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. 

  • Meet meeting codes are complex by default and therefore resilient to brute-force “guessing.”

  • Meet video meetings are encrypted in transit, and all recordings stored in Google Drive are encrypted in transit and at rest.

  • We don’t require plugins to use Meet on the web. It works entirely in Chrome and other modern browsers, so it’s less vulnerable to security threats.

  • On mobile, we have dedicated Google Meet apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. 

  • Meet users can enroll their account in Google’s Advanced Protection Program—our strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking.

  • Google Cloud undergoes regular rigorous security and privacy audits for all its services. Our global compliance certifications can help support regulatory requirements such as GDPR and HIPAA, as well as COPPA and FERPA for education. 

  • Your Meet data is not used for advertising, and we don't sell your data to third parties.

We operate a highly secure and resilient private network that encircles the globe and connects our data centers to each other—ensuring that your data stays safe. Trust is built on transparency and we publish the locations of all our data centers. You can learn more about how Meet keeps your video meetings safe in this post.

Free Google Meet accounts for individuals

You can use Meet to schedule, join or start secure video meetings with anyone—for a virtual yoga class, weekly book club, neighborhood meeting, or happy hour with friends. Until now, Meet has only been available as part of G Suite, our collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organizations and schools. Going forward, Meet will be available to anyone for free on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android. And if you use Google Calendar, you’ll be able to easily start or join from there, too.
Google Meet - Create-New-Meeting_gb.gif

Use your existing Google Account to start a secure meeting in Google Meet

If you have an existing Google Account (for example, if you’re a @gmail.com user), sign in at meet.google.com to get started. If you don’t have a free Google Account, it only takes a minute to create one using your work or personal email address of choice (we require this step as a security measure, and you’ll only need to do this once).

Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we won’t enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30. Creating a trusted meeting space is important, and being mindful when sharing meeting links in public forums can help create a safe experience for all attendees. For more tips on how to use Meet securely and effectively, visit our Help Center. 

Google Meet for groups and teams

Groups within an organization can also use Meet to create video meetings that help coworkers connect one-on-one, collaborate as a team, and more. For organizations that aren’t already G Suite customers, today we’re announcing G Suite Essentials. G Suite Essentials is perfect for teams that need access to Meet’s more advanced features, such as dial-in phone numbers, larger meetings, and meeting recording. G Suite Essentials also includes Google Drive for easy and secure access to all of a team’s content, and Docs, Sheets and Slides for content creation and real-time collaboration. 

Through Sept. 30, we’re providing G Suite Essentials and all of these advanced features free of charge. If you’re interested in G Suite Essentials, complete this form to get in touch with our sales team. 

Google Meet for businesses and organizations

Whether it’s hospitals supporting patients via telehealth, banks working with loan applicants, retailers assisting customers remotely, or manufacturers interacting safely with warehouse technicians, businesses across every industry are using Meet to stay connected. If you’re one of the 6 million companies and organizations that use G Suite to power remote productivity, you already have access to Meet. Admins simply need to enable Meet by following instructions outlined on our Help Center. In the spirit of being helpful during this time, we’re providing three ways for new and current enterprise customers to access Meet through Sept. 30: 

  • Free access to Meet’s advanced features for all G Suite customers, such as the ability to live stream for up to 100,000 viewers within your domain.

  • Free additional Meet licenses for existing G Suite customers without any amendments to their current contract.

  • Free G Suite Essentials for enterprise customers. 

Enterprises can get in touch with our sales team to learn more.
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Google Meet includes live captions powered by Google’s speech recognition technology

Google Meet in schools and higher-ed institutions

Many schools and colleges today use Meet to power secure virtual classes, PTA meetings, parent-teacher conferences, tutoring, and even school socials. Meet is included in G Suite for Education, which serves more than 120 million students and teachers globally. If your school already uses G Suite for Education, your administrator can enable Meet at no additional cost. If your school doesn’t use G Suite for Education, you can sign up here. To access resources for distance learning, visit Teach from Home.

Our hope is that by making Meet and G Suite more readily available for all, it will be easier to securely stay connected and productive—now and in the future.

Automate & Extend with Apps Script (Google Cloud for Student Developers)

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Cloud


In the previous episode of our new Google Cloud for Student Developers video series, we introduced G Suite REST APIs, showing how to enhance your applications by integrating with Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. However, not all developers prefer the lower-level style of programming requiring the use of HTTP, OAuth2, and processing the request-response cycle of API usage. Building apps that access Google technologies is open to everyone at any level, not just advanced software engineers.

Enhancing career readiness of non-engineering majors helps make our services more inclusive and helps democratize API functionality to a broader audience. For the budding data scientist, business analyst, DevOps staff, or other technical professionals who don't code every day as part of their profession, Google Apps Script was made just for you. Rather than thinking about development stacks, HTTP, or authorization, you access Google APIs with objects.

This video blends a standard "Hello World" example with various use cases where Apps Script shines, including cases of automation, add-ons that extend the functionality of G Suite editors like Docs, Sheets, and Slides, accessing other Google or online services, and custom functions for Google Sheets—the ability to add new spreadsheet functions.

One featured example demonstrates the power to reach multiple Google technologies in an expressive way: lots of work, not much code. What may surprise readers is that this entire app, written by a colleague years ago, is comprised of just 4 lines of code: 

function sendMap() {
  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
  var address = sheet.getRange('A1').getValue();
  var map = Maps.newStaticMap().addMarker(address);
  GmailApp.sendEmail('[email protected]',
     'Map', 'See below.', {attachments:[map]});
}

Apps Script shields its users from the complexities of authorization and "API service endpoints." Developers only need an object to interface with a service; in this case, SpreadsheetApp to access Google Sheets, and similarly, Maps for Google Maps plus GmailApp for Gmail. Viewers can build this sample line-by-line with its corresponding codelab (a self-paced, hands-on tutorial). This example helps student (and professional) developers...

  1. Build something useful that can be extended into much more
  2. Learn how to accomplish several tasks without a lot of code
  3. Imagine what else is possible with G Suite developer tools

For further exploration, check out this video as well as this one which introduces Apps Script and presents the same code sample with more details. (Note the second video emails the map's link, but the app has been updated to attach it instead; the code has been updated everywhere else.) You may also access the code at its open source repository. If that's not enough, learn about other ways you can use Apps Script from its video library. Finally, stay tuned for the next pair of episodes which will cover full sample apps, one with G Suite REST APIs, and another with Apps Script.

We look forward to seeing what you build with Google Cloud.