The Piedmont Highlander

The Student News Site of Piedmont High School

The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

Meet Google’s new updates

Meet Googles new updates

 

Over the next few months, Google will be introducing a series of new updates to their educational services, specifically Google Meet. Starting Sep. 21, teachers were able to fill out a form that gave them access to features including polls, a question and answer box, background blur, and built-in breakout rooms and digital whiteboards.

The updates aim to help the millions of new students and teachers that now rely on Google services for online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic by introducing features that improve the learning and teaching experience, according to Google. Piedmont has been given early access to a few of these features, allowing teachers to test and provide feedback before the official release next month according to an email from the PUSD administration.

“The email said that Google is looking for folks to try out and provide feedback on enterprise features coming to Google meet next month,” English teacher Mercedes Foster said. “It was just like, ‘would you like to try these things before they’re released to everybody else?’ And then you have to follow certain Google protocols.”

One of the biggest updates teachers are still waiting for is the ability to have a larger grid view without the need for a third-party extension. This would allow all students to be visible in a single view without the compromises of the additional software. According to Google, the update will allow teachers to see up to 49 students at once and will be coming soon.

“The gridview extension allows for as many people to see each other as possible, but it just brings a device to a grinding halt,” PHS tech coordinator Jana Branisa said. “It’s problematic. We’re sort of stuck in that if we want to see all of our students the teacher needs to use it.”

Branisa said that she hopes the new update will fix this issue, but for the time being, the gridview extension in addition to other hardware and connectivity issues are creating problems for both teachers and students.

To mitigate some of these issues, the district released a Chromebook optimization guide describing the various steps students should take if they are having technical difficulties.

“It’s a list of things to do to improve the performance of your device, and one of them is to turn off video and turn off gridview,” Branisa said. “Don’t let 30 threads of video processes into your computer all at the same time.”

According to another email sent from Google, Google Meet will be introducing new controls that allow teachers to limit who can share their screen and use the chat feature over the next few weeks. Other features coming later this year include virtual hand-raising, call recording, and attendance tracking.

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