In our recent webinar, Meet vs. Zoom, myself and Melissa King discussed many of the pros and cons to both Google Meet and Zoom. At the time, one of the cons for Google Meet was the teachers inability to keep students from joining a Google Meet without them. I had many teachers express to me concerns of students using Google Meet inappropriately on a Meet they had created while they were not yet and/or no longer in the meeting. Fortunately, this issue seems to have been very quickly resolved by Google and I am excited to share two ways to better secure your Google Meet.
Through these two methods, students will no longer be able to join a Google Meet without their teacher present. While I have tested these two methods out in my own district and found them to work, there is a possibility that this may have not rolled out in all districts at this time.
Here are a couple of important things I noticed when testing this out today:
- Students will no longer be able to join before and/or stay after with only the following two ways. I haven’t seen success via Google Calendars at this time.
- Students will go to a “waiting room” if the teacher is not present in the meeting. Once the teacher joins, they will be given the “join” button.
- Students can enter a Google Meet for any teacher present in a Google Meet, whether they were the original host or not.
- Anyone entering from outside of the district domain will always see the button “Ask to Join” when wishing to enter a Google Meet.
#1: Nicknamed Google Meet
The first way to secure your Google Meet is by creating a nicknamed chat via www.meet.google.com. In this menu, you will create a nickname for your Google Meet and will give that nickname to your students to enter.
I highly suggest that you give students the nickname only and have them enter through the Google Meet main menu. From what we have tested, even if the students copy the URL at the top, they still wouldn’t be able to enter the Google Meet without you. However, it’s just easier to give them the nickname each time!
Interested in watching it in action? Watch this amazing video by Eric Curts from Control Alt Achieve on YouTube:
#2: Google Classroom Meet Link
The second way to secure your Google Meet is by using the Google Meet URL from your Google Classroom. This is a new feature that just rolled out today (at least in my district) and is an amazing feature for teachers! Now, Google Classroom has a Google Meet link that you can turn on in your settings menu.
In the same way as the nicknamed meet, this should prevent students from joining before and/or staying after in your Google Meet. We tested it out in our district and found it to be already rolled out and active.
Interested in watching it in action? Watch this helpful video by Scott Wagner on YouTube:
I have to say that I am incredibly excited to see this feature available in Google Meet. Personally, I have some concerns about the privacy and security of Zoom and have a lot of comfort using Google Meet since it already exists within our school district’s domain. Therefore, I am excited to see this added bit of security available for our teachers, if they choose to use it.
I would love to hear about your distance learning experience in relation to Google Meet and/or Zoom below, so please share with us in the comments!
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We are seeing that students who join the google meet through classrooms before the teacher, have rights to silence and remove other students. Do you know a workaround?
I have not heard about that before! My best guess is that this could be a setting in the Google Admin Console settings.
I am seeing the same thing… from classroom they are able to join before me and I am not allowed to mute or boot them. Record isnt working consistently either.
You are not the only one. I am hearing this more and more this week. We were told that if it was a link from Google Classroom that it would prevent others from joining until the teacher was there. It is turning out that this is not consistent for everyone. I am so sorry!
After each meet the teacher has to hide the meet link in settings, then reset the link. Next class time, join the meet, then reveal the link on Classroom to the students.
Our problem is that students are sharing the Classroom Meet link to other students and also to outside accounts. The teachers are being bombarded with unauthorized requests to join, with many of the private accounts displaying very inappropriate screen names. A good feature to add to Meet is to have a switch to block requests at will.