Tag: distanced learning

More Jamboard in the Music Classroom (Testing The New Integration with Google Meet)

Google Meet rolling out Jamboard integration for collaborative whiteboarding | 9to5Google:

Last week, Google’s video conferencing tool launched a 49-person grid and background blur. Google Meet is now integrating with Jamboard to add a digital whiteboard for visual and collaborative brainstorming.

Google Jamboard, which I have blogged about here, is indeed a fun tool and all of my students find it engaging. 

This new Google Meet integration is awesome. Once you start up a digital whiteboard from within a Meet, Jamboard asks you if you want to create a new one or use an existing file in your Google Drive. If you opt to create a new one, it automatically saves it to your drive and names it using the date and meet code of your session.

Immediately, a dialogue with share permissions for the file pops up, pre-filled with the accounts of all students who are present in the Meet so that you can make sure they all have access in one click.

The integration is very smooth. I tested it today at the beginning of my classes so that they could give feedback to one another on a recent Soundtrap project I had them do.

The students recorded brass duets and trios in Soundtrap projects last week. I played three examples of them for the class today and students posted sticky notes on this whiteboard that took me one minute to set up last night. It was a simple activity that was made even more simple by this new integration.

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Attendance for Google Meet | A Chrome Extension That Automatically Takes Your Attendance for You and Saves It to a Google Sheet

Attendance for Google Meet (download here) is an exceptional extension for Google Chrome that automatically takes attendance for you and saves it to a Google Sheet document in your Google Drive.

There are other extensions like this but most of them are poorly designed, buggy, and unreliable. 

Attendance for Google Meet has an elegant and straightforward design and user experience, down to the icon even matching Google’s ‘Material Design’ language. I am especially proud of this extension because it is made by a student at Centennial High School, which is one of the schools that my band program sends students to when they graduate.

Watch the video below to get an idea of what the features look like in action.

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The process is simple. Once installed, you are prompted to create a class list the next time you start a Google Meet. Creating a list is as simple as entering the students names and pressing enter after each one. Once a class is created, you can select it from the same menu every time you launch a Meet. 

The app logs when kids enter, when they leave, and the total number of minutes they spent in class, so you can catch it if they dip in for the first minute and then leave immediately. Even the Google Sheet is designed to be easy to read.

There are some bugs, notably that the chat window closes frequently during the session. I also have to manually export the list before closing the Meet because the option you check in settings to make this happen automatically keeps turning itself off.

I strongly recommend this extension if you are teaching with Google Meet this year. Congratulations to this awesome student developer on making such a useful tool for teachers!