Chances are good that you, your kids or both have had to adopt some form of video chat software over the past few weeks. Rightfully so, video conferencing has seen exponential growth since millions have made the move to working from home and non-traditional homeschooling. Jumping into a video chat with a handful of users is relatively simple and there are plenty of platforms such as Zoom, Skype, WebEx and Google Meet at our fingertips.
What happens when you’re meeting includes dozens of users, if not more? focusing on one speaker and keeping things corralled can be a headache if you’re relying on verbal feedback from multiple users. For Google Meet, there’s an extension that addresses that very issue. Yesterday, Robby highlighted a third-party extension that brings Zoom’s popular grid view to Google’s Meet platform and one user pointed out that the “Nod” extension is another powerful resource for maintaining a productive chat while allowing for visual but silent reactions from onlookers.
Nod – Reactions for Google Meet
As the name implies, the Nod extension integrates with Google Meet and allows users to add non-verbal interactions to the conference. The “emoji” list is short and sweet but it lets the host or speaker know that the user is engaged with the content that’s being served. There’s also a handy “hand-raising” option that will let the speaker know that there is a question or interaction from a viewer without interrupting the meeting. This feature also comes with a notification option just in case you have your window minimized during a meeting. For the countless schools that are using Meet as their go-to platform, I can imagine that this will bring a lot of productivity to the table and from the looks of it, many agree.
The extension, available from the Chrome Web Store, has nearly 1 million downloads at the time of this article and I expect that it will gain more and more users in the coming months. Nod is a third-party extension not provided by Google but it requires no special permissions and it is completely free to use with Google Meet. You can find Nod in the Chrome Web Store at the link below.
Shout out to Josh Garrett for sharing this awesome extension.
