Google Meet

[the_quick]

We will be organising parents evening through a video calls, we hope to use Google Meet, but each time I tried to test it, with my hotmail account, after pressing join it redirect to Google Login page.

 

I though that in G suite we can invite people outside gmail/g suite - or is this a paid feature?

 

EDIT: For anyone with the same problem: Google stopped "anonymous" user to join meetings - so basically if person doesn't have a google account, they are anonymous. We had to ask Google Support to switch that off for us

LINK

Edited October 7, 2020 by the_quick

[Koldov]

Registering my interest in the answer!

 

This hasn't even been discussed here yet (that I've been made aware of - although there would be nothing new there)...

 

If you are a GSuite school (presuming so as you've decided to use 'Meet') it would be my suggestion (as it it will be here if I'm asked) that the parents could log-in using the child's account.

[jthompson]

It's definitely possible, as we're able to allow non-signed in attendees here (they type in a name to use before requesting to join the meeting). We're using the free GSFE, not GSEFE.

 

Be careful inviting students to Meet meetings arranged from calendar events. The meetings never end and so students will be able to rejoin those meetings at any time in the future without staff needing to be present. They don't have the same "teacher must be present first" safeguard that Classroom Meet IDs do.

[paulkerton]

We will be organising parents evening through a video calls, we hope to use Google Meet, but each time I tried to test it, with my hotmail account, after pressing join it redirect to Google Login page.

I though that in G suite we can invite people outside gmail/g suite - or is this a paid feature?

In G Suite for Education environments, anonymous users are blocked by default from joining Google Meets.

This is so anonymous accounts cannot compromise remote learning Meets with students.

 

You can also request that anonymous accounts be allowed via Google Support in the Admin Console, but I'd definitely think twice about doing that.

 

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/07/anonymous-users-will-be-blocked-from.html

If you are a GSuite school (presuming so as you've decided to use 'Meet') it would be my suggestion (as it it will be here if I'm asked) that the parents could log-in using the child's account.

That is a really, really bad idea. The account is the child's account. It needs to be secure for the privacy of other children.

[ShorehamGeek]

You can do it. You just need to allow a little time. Call Google tech support, and request an exception to the new rule of disabling anonymous external participants in Google Meet. They told us it would be 24-72 hours to take effect. It seemed to take a little longer (almost as if a great many people were suddenly asking for it!).

 

Here we only allow staff to create Meets, and it is only the owner of the meet that can allow external participants in to join.

Edited October 7, 2020 by ShorehamGeek

[Koldov]

Was just about to say that I doubt it's possible according to this link

 

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/07/anonymous-users-will-be-blocked-from.html

 

and the thread I found it on...

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/216363-anonymous-users-will-blocked-google-meet-g-suite-education-3.html

 

Did it not happen (or did you get an exemption)...?

 

EDIT: Haha Ninja'd twice!

Edited October 7, 2020 by Koldov

[jthompson]

In G Suite for Education environments, anonymous users are blocked by default from joining Google Meets.

This is so anonymous accounts cannot compromise remote learning Meets with students.

 

You can also request that anonymous accounts be allowed via Google Support in the Admin Console, but I'd definitely think twice about doing that.

 

Ah yes, I forgot that. We had to enable anonymous access to facilitate external speakers in some lessons. We then had to circulate instruction to teachers about joining their lessons a second time so that nuisance join requests spamming a lesson wouldn't keep appearing over their presentation.

[Koldov]

That is a really, really bad idea. The account is the child's account. It needs to be secure for the privacy of other children.

 

Ah, yes I do see your point!

 

So your policy is that no parent knows their child's log-in information?

 

And you do not allow 'anonymous accounts' to access Meet?

[paulkerton]

Ah, yes I do see your point!

So your policy is that no parent knows their child's log-in information?

 

We provide that information to the child. Our AUP says not to share their login information with anyone.

If parents get that login information and we are made aware of that, then we will reset their password and wait for them to come forward to ICT Support.

 

And you do not allow 'anonymous accounts' to access Meet?

 

We don't allow anonymous accounts. If someone needs to access a Meet we've created they need to create a Google account of some kind to access a Meet.

Standard G Suite accounts will do. They can even create them without Gmail so they just use their regular email address.

 

Oh also, Education Meet accounts cannot attend Google Meets created in the consumer facing version of Google Meet either, only to other G Suite level accounts.

Edited October 7, 2020 by paulkerton

[Koldov]

Be careful inviting students to Meet meetings arranged from calendar events. The meetings never end and so students will be able to rejoin those meetings at any time in the future without staff needing to be present. They don't have the same "teacher must be present first" safeguard that Classroom Meet IDs do.

 

So, there is also a 'Google Classroom Meet' as well, are there seperate admin controls for this?

 

If I have disabled the Meet app in the main admin portal for the students OU, do they have access to the Classroom Meet or is that only able to be controlled by a teacher?

 

Just out of interest, are there many other versions of apps available via Classroom?

[Koldov]

We provide that information to the child.

 

Just out of interest (if you are comfortable to say), what age range of children are at your school?

[paulkerton]

Just out of interest (if you are comfortable to say), what age range of children are at your school?

3 to 18.

[paulkerton]

So, there is also a 'Google Classroom Meet' as well, are there seperate admin controls for this?

 

Kind of. You need to setup the student OUs so they're unable to create their own meetings, only join existing ones.

Once you do this, the Google Classroom Link for Meet is setup so that only teachers can enter first, and if a student tries to do so before the teacher has arrived it tells them they need to refresh and the class will appear once teacher has arrived.

The teacher then has the quick access controls to turn off chat, present to the meet and to turn off people being able to access the room without knocking first.

 

Paul.

[the_quick]

We asked for this to be unblocked, but possibly we will invite pupils and ask them to login with parent presents - parents evening are done with 3 participants anyway - teacher, pupil and parent.

 

But we have another issue, despite switch off in host options "quick access" for some reason pupils and anyone in the organization can just join the meeting, without waiting to be admitted???

[paulkerton]

We asked for this to be unblocked, but possibly we will invite pupils and ask them to login with parent presents - parents evening are done with 3 participants anyway - teacher, pupil and parent.

 

But we have another issue, despite switch off in host options "quick access" for some reason pupils and anyone in the organization can just join the meeting, without waiting to be admitted???

 

Make sure your settings for Google Meet in the student OUs are as follows:

[the_quick]

Thanks Paul, we have options for students to allow them video calling. I have disabled it, but apparently can take sometime before changes take place. Will check tomorrow again

[jthompson]

So, there is also a 'Google Classroom Meet' as well, are there seperate admin controls for this?

 

If I have disabled the Meet app in the main admin portal for the students OU, do they have access to the Classroom Meet or is that only able to be controlled by a teacher?

 

Just out of interest, are there many other versions of apps available via Classroom?

 

No, it's all one and the same app. The key thing is that meetings can either be 'nicknamed' or not. A nicknamed meeting is treated slightly differently by Google, in that people may not join or rejoin a nicknamed meeting if the host is not currently present. The host being the person who created the meeting in the first place.

 

With Google Classroom, a teacher can attach a nicknamed meeting to their class, which simplifies the process of conducting an online lesson. The meeting link is presented right in the top of the class page and since the meeting is nicknamed, students can't join without the teacher being present.

 

My earlier post about meetings created using Google Calendar was based on the fact the those meetings are by default not nicknamed, so would allow student to freely rejoin those meetings unsupervised at any point. I've since discovered that when creating a calendar event and adding the Meet function, you can actually replace the automatically generated non-nicknamed meeting id with a nicknamed one.

[Zammo]

We have anonymous access allowed (achieved by emailing Google support to ask for the restriction to be turned off)

 

It would be great to have more granular control over this setting so we can only allow meets ran by teachers to receive anonymous guests, but on balance we felt the inconvenience of not being able to conduct meetings with externals, interviews etc without a Google account was greater than a pretty remote safeguarding risk

Edited October 7, 2020 by Zammo

[fiza]

I've since discovered that when creating a calendar event and adding the Meet function, you can actually replace the automatically generated non-nicknamed meeting id with a nicknamed one.

 

Where can you do this please? I have just tried to change the Meeting ID in Calendar to a nickname and I get "You can only enter an existing meeting code"

[jthompson]

TBH the most immediate thing to consider is the fact that pupils can make a nuisance of themselves if they just continually attempt to join a meeting code whilst not signed in to Google. The join request appears right in the middle of the teacher's screen and makes a ding noise each time. IIRC we got around that by having teachers open an incognito window, request to join their own meeting, let themselves in, mute their original tab and then proceed to present from their incognito window.

[jthompson]

Where can you do this please? I have just tried to change the Meeting ID in Calendar to a nickname and I get "You can only enter an existing meeting code"

 

When creating a calendar event, click the Add Google Meet video conferencing button. Under that will appear a URL for the automatically generated meeting. Click on that, and you'll get to edit the meeting ID to replace it with an ID for another meeting. If you create a new nicknamed meeting from the Meet homepage, you can copy the meet link from that into the calendar event.

 

With the ID of the nicknamed meeting attached to the calendar event, students won't be able to join or rejoin it without the calendar owner being present.

 

All a bit too fiddly for general usership, though.

[paulkerton]

TBH the most immediate thing to consider is the fact that pupils can make a nuisance of themselves if they just continually attempt to join a meeting code whilst not signed in to Google. The join request appears right in the middle of the teacher's screen and makes a ding noise each time. IIRC we got around that by having teachers open an incognito window, request to join their own meeting, let themselves in, mute their original tab and then proceed to present from their incognito window.

This is why we left anonymous access switched off. At this point, only students with named accounts on our system can join. If they try to join from an account outside the domain it labels it as such, and if they get rejected twice they can't try again.

[fiza]

This is why we left anonymous access switched off. At this point, only students with named accounts on our system can join. If they try to join from an account outside the domain it labels it as such, and if they get rejected twice they can't try again.

Our problem is that not only do they want Meets with Students they want Meets with external agencies/people who obviously don't have Google IDs. We had to allow the anonymous access.

[the_quick]

Our problem is that not only do they want Meets with Students they want Meets with external agencies/people who obviously don't have Google IDs. We had to allow the anonymous access.

 

Same here.

 

With using meet for classes and pupils, the problem still exists, that we cannot stop pupils joining when teacher already start a meeting. The best option would be to have control of the meeting. Like switch joining automatically off and on. It is there under Host options - "quick access" but switching it off doesn't do anything if the meeting doesn't have a nick name and you don't invite students directly.

 

So to make people ask before they can join is to send them a link, but not invite them in the Google Meet directly - really weird how it works. I wonder if Education Enterprise has more options

[paulkerton]

Same here.

 

With using meet for classes and pupils, the problem still exists, that we cannot stop pupils joining when teacher already start a meeting.

 

You can, if you have the settings in place I sent you the other day.

 

The best option would be to have control of the meeting. Like switch joining automatically off and on. It is there under Host options - "quick access" but switching it off doesn't do anything if the meeting doesn't have a nick name and you don't invite students directly.

They should be using the Meet Link in Google Classroom

So to make people ask before they can join is to send them a link, but not invite them in the Google Meet directly - really weird how it works. I wonder if Education Enterprise has more options

That's what the functionality in Meet Link in Google Classroom gives you. It's not a calendar invite, so if the teacher goes in and then turns off Quick Access, they can't enter without asking.

No Education Enterprise doesn't have more options.