Make Google Meet better with these 5 Chrome extensions

hey friends welcome to another episode my name is John so wash in this video you're gonna learn about five Chrome extensions that will make your Google week experience even better now Google meet and zoom and other video conferencing tools have become a central focal point in the classrooms of teachers around the world due to the coronavirus school shutdown the question of meet vs. zoom comes up all the time I probably answer that question one to three times every day but honestly the reality is it doesn't matter it's kind of like Coke versus Pepsi Ford versus Chevy pick the platform that works best for you now if you're teaching with Chromebooks Google classroom if you're a G suite for education school it makes sense to use Google meat it's integrated with all of those other products so in this video I'm going to be highlighting five Chrome extensions that will help your meat experience be even better now soom is a pretty cool platform they have some nice features and a lot of teachers are disappointed that zoom doesn't have some of those features these chrome extensions will give you some of those same features and functionality so you can see here I've got quite the setup I've got two devices this device over here is actually my student device so I've got a bunch of student accounts in a Google meat session here this is my teacher device and so I'll be moving back and forth between them so you can kind of get both the teacher and the student view alright let's dive in now the first extension that I like to share with you is called grid view now soom has a feature that allows you to see all of the participants in a virtual meeting at the same time Google meet does not now a recent update to Google meet has added something in that is helpful if you go down to the three dots in the bottom right corner of your screen and click on change layout you will see this new tile layout and that is definitely an improvement the tiled layout will allow you to see up to 16 people in your meet session at the same time if you have less than 16 students it's a great option you don't really even need extension it's built right in but most teachers have more than 16 students and you'll still run into the same issue where some participants won't be displayed there's a wonderful Chrome extension called grid view that will allow you to see an unlimited number of participants at the same time and I know this and I have tested this I was in a session about a week ago that had more than 200 people in it I was using grid view and it works beautifully it's a little crazy the picture gets smaller and smaller but it does work so here is the grid view extension you just need to have it installed it's free and when it's installed you'll get this little checkerboard icon within Google meat now if you see the little line through the checkerboard that means that grid View is disabled so I'm gonna go ahead and click on grid view that will turn it on and now all of my participants will be tiled now grid view does offer a couple of really cool bonus features as well if I put my mouse over the grid view extension you'll see the drop down so for those who don't have video I can hide them I can highlight the speaker so whoever's talking is going to be more prominent some teachers a lot of teachers do want to be able to see their video feed even while they're observing their students and so you can make that happen as well and then this last one is pretty slick I've used it a few times if you need to take a screenshot of your video perhaps for attendance or documentation purposes you can enable that which just makes it easier to take a screenshot and you can even hide the participants name if you like as well so it's a great extension I'd highly recommend it I do like the tiled view that Google has rolled out but grid view still has an important place okay so that's option one that solves a major complaint with meat which is being able to see everyone on your screen now one quick note about grid view it's great for the teacher but I actually don't typically recommend that students install grid view because if you are presenting a lesson to them they don't need to see everyone in the class they want to see your screen primarily so most of the time I recommend grid view for teachers you really don't need it unless you're presenting ad as a whole group when I do a virtual session for teachers a lot of them have grid-view installed I actually have them turn it off when I'm presenting so they can see my screen more clearly all right so that's the first one that's called grid view the second extension I'd like to share with you is not no this is a really good one for students they're gonna love this it really adds a lot of function to Google classroom nod allows students and participants to provide reactions throughout your video so when you have the nod extension installed over in the top left corner of your screen you're gonna get these emoji icons so if I put my mouse over the thumbs up you can see all the different emojis that are there so if my teacher tells a really funny joke I can click the lol and that will be displayed on the screen for everyone else to see as well I also really like the hand race feature which is really helpful for large groups if someone has a question they can click the hand raise icon that will stay on the screen it identifies the person and as the presenter I can then say oh hey John has a question stop and allow John to unmute his mic and then speak to the rest of the class the only way that you can use the not extension is if everyone has it installed so in order to see the reaction icons you must have the extension it's important you have that extension installed prior to joining your meeting or less or you have to refresh you exit and then rejoin the session for it to for to load it's really fun it adds kind of been like Facebook or Instagram live video reactions to your session allows your students to say engage you to get some feedback while you're presenting to them so that's number 2 our second Chrome extension called nod extension number 3 is called meet attendance if it is important for you to take attendance during your sessions this is a perfect extension it is a little funky to use I'm going to try to walk you through it the meet attendance extension only needs to be installed by the teacher the teacher is gonna be the one taking the attendance and you're actually going to go to the people tab in your meet session so this is where it will list all of the participants when you have the meet attendance extension installed you're gonna see this bonus icon right in the middle this clipboard okay putting your mouse over that clipboard will bring up a series of options now it does work well but it is a little bit cryptic because it doesn't actually explain what any of these icons do so I'll do my best to explain it for you the first thing you're gonna want to do is click this first icon on the left and that will create a new Google spreadsheet so your attendance is going to be taken in Google sheets that will create a new spreadsheet for you it may prompt you to log into your Google account the first time you use it if you ever want to view that spreadsheet simply click they meet attendance icon right up at the top here now right now meet attendance is off and that's what this first toggle switch is this is the on/off button okay so I'm gonna turn it on and you can you'll know that it's on because it'll record I'll show you the total number of people in your session currently five if I want to view the attendance I'll go ahead and click the meet attendance icon that will open up the Google sheet and it automatically records the names of everyone currently logged into the meet session now this is designed to be very passive it just works and so anytime you view the attendance you view the the people in the session it will record who is there so I don't know if you could catch that but if I click off on the screen here and then I go and view the participants again you're gonna see the meet attendance icon very briefly turns red that tells you that it's working and then if I look at my attendance sheet every time I do that it adds a new row and so you could take attendance at the beginning middle and end of the session to see who was there the entire time who dropped off over time it's a little funky it has some some rough edges but it does the job once you kind of use it for a little bit you understand how it works it'll make sense now again just to round off the different settings here I'll do it one more time so the first link icon is to create a new sheet so every time if you want to create a new sheet for attendance for each session you would click that one the second button will create a new sheet within your workbook so it'll just take the attendance on different sheets this is the on/off toggle switch and then this third the last one on here is the scroll switch and I guess this is how it's coded so if you have a very big meeting with dozens and dozens of people it actually has to scroll all the way down on the screen to capture everyone's name so you're gonna want to leave that last switch over on the right leave that on at all times if you don't want to take attendance throughout the session you would take it the first time just go down here turn it off and then maybe turn back on at the end to record attendance at the end of your session there is a video in the Chrome Web Store that kind of walks you through meets if you need another refresher but that should get you started so that's our third extension meet attendance the next one I'd like to share with you is interesting and I think this one will be particularly helpful to elementary teachers muting and unmuting the microphone is a challenge it's a challenge for adults and it's a challenge for elementary students as well the fourth extension I'd like to share with you is called push-to-talk and it allows you to use the spacebar to mute and unmute your mic so the push-to-talk extension must be installed for all everyone in the meeting so students teachers alike you'll see this fun little monkey icon right here that's the the extension there is one trick that you have to know for this to work well okay so people are going to join the meeting and then they must first manually mute themselves so you join the meeting and then you are going to need to go down here and the only click the mute button once you have done that you can use the spacebar to mute and unmute so if I press space you'll notice that the mic icon turns white again and I let go and it turns red again so it's a really simple way to mute and unmute your mic as long as you remember that first time you have to manually mute yourself you will need to teach your students now how to press and release that mute button but it works really really well it's a simple way for short responses from your students so that's our fourth extension it's called push-to-talk last one number five another very very common question that I receive is when I am presenting how do I still see my students so I still want to watch their video screens and also share my presentation or whatever it is that I want to share now the way that I do it is by using this second monitor so typically I will put I will keep the meet session on my computer and then whatever website or presentation I'm sharing I will put on this second monitor and I only share this one if you only have one monitor then you can utilize a Chrome extension called dual Liss so essentially if you are dual monitor less this is the extension for you so I'll do a quick demo of it let's pretend I want to share this screen right here okay but I also want to keep an eye on my student video feeds here is the dual less Chrome extension and this is a window splitter so I'm going to click on that and that's going to give me a variety of options how do I want to split my screen you can see 50/50 60/40 70/30 I'm gonna do kind of a middle one 6040 okay so I'm going to click on that and that will split my screen okay so I've got here's the website that I want to share over on the right and I still have my video feeds over on the left now when I click on the present button I'm going to present typically a window and I will simply select the window that has the presentation the PowerPoint the Google slide the website that I wish to share so I'm going to click on share now my students can see what's over here on the right side of my screen but I can still keep an eye on them and see what's happening on the left side of my screen now anything that I do here over on the Left I mean I can open a new tab I can open up an email open up my calendar students won't be able to see any of that because I'm only sharing what's posted over on this side it's a very helpful very useful strategy for kind of hiding some things and displaying other things the challenge with this is you have limited screen real estate so if you have a smaller device it's just not a very big window to work with if you're gonna be doing this frequently I would recommend investing in a second monitor so that you can do the same thing you just have a lot more screen space to work with so that's my fifth extension again that's called dual les which allows you to mirror or split your windows so you can see more than one thing at the same time now there are some additional issues with Google meat that I do not have solutions for unfortunately we're still working on those so things like the ability to change your background automatically mute participants those are still issues that need to be resolved if you have a suggestion if you have any tools that will let you accomplish those things in Google meat I would love to hear about them thanks for watching see you next time you

Channel: John R. Sowash

Views: 1,057,324

Rating: 4.8967395 out of 5

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Id: dw1rVmDc6mc

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020