Digital Workspace

G Suite for Education’s New Features Make E-Learning More Secure

Users of the collaboration suite now have access to premium Google Meet features at no cost.

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Micah Castelo is a web editor for EdTech: Focus on K-12. Her experience includes education and community news coverage for the Syracuse Post-Standard and international news reporting for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Last month, Google for Education announced that they’ve extended access to premium Google Meet features for all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users until Sept. 30, 2020.

The update was in response to students and educators around the world who are adapting to remote learning due to mandatory school closures caused by the novel coronavirus.

For many schools, that means finding efficient ways to collaborate and communicate outside classroom walls, such as using cloud-based collaboration tools like G Suite for Education and videoconferencing technology.

“With this increase in usage, one consistent theme we’ve heard is that educators are looking for ways to continue teaching and collaborating in a virtual environment that is safe and secure,” writes Zach Yeskel, group product manager at Google for Education, in a blog post announcing the update.

Google has also integrated Meet features into Google Classroom, making it easier for teachers to have secure class video meetings with their students. Meet also comes with protections to ensure data privacy and security, such as data encryption, and complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

DISCOVER: Learn how school districts are tackling remote learning.

Here are a few things to note about the Google Meet features update:

Users can have meetings for up to 250 participants per call and live streams for up to 100,000 viewers within the school domain.
Users can now record meetings and save them to Google Drive.
Teachers can create unique Meet links to have a dedicated virtual meeting space for each class on Google Classroom.
School administrators can assign meeting creation privileges to individuals or groups, preventing students from joining meetings outside those created by faculty or staff.
Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other participants in a video meeting, or approve requests to join made by participants outside the school’s domain.