The pandemic required the world to reorganize itself quickly, and the education sector had to digitize at an accelerated pace so that distance learning would be viable during this period. Zoom and Google Meet became very targeted during this period, and the Google product will implement new features aimed at helping educators, of which the transcription of classes is just the most notable.

Google has announced a series of new features for Workspace for Education and Meet itself, starting with new features for teachers. It will soon be possible to lock access to rooms before an educator joins. They will also be able to turn off video conferencing for all participants as soon as a class ends.

The invention of the Green Room has saved many people time, and soon individual and group rooms will be able to be created by teachers even before a global one is up and running. In other words, on days when group activities are being promoted, educators will be able to save time by putting certain students together. From there, using an administration panel, they can navigate through the different rooms, monitor the development of activities and ask questions.

In the coming weeks, Google Meet will also allow teachers to mute the microphones of all other participants if they so wish. This way, a class can continue without interruptions, or students can interact in real time. This feature will not affect the raise hand tool, which signals the administrator of the virtual environment when they wish to interact.

Another future development — this one for a few months from now — involves the security of transmissions: the educator will be able to define whether only guests on a pre-selected list will be able to join video conferences, and whether a student from their organization can make calls to others from a different school using the tool.

More accessible for students too

In the coming months, Google Meet will feature automatic transcription of classes, useful for those who miss a virtual school day, or for teachers to summarize their own classes. This material can be edited by the educator before being shared.

In addition, it will be possible to interact with the class content through a limited group of emojis. Students will be able to change the color of the stickers, but it is the teacher who will configure when this element can be used in class.

Finally, the company is working on a version of Google Meet that is better optimized for weak connections, as well as allowing access to archived material offline.

In conclusion, a lot of new features are coming to the company's educational tools. Unfortunately, Google's blog article does not commit to dates, but given the need for tools for remote teaching today, the company certainly will not let these new features sit on its servers.

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