Students will soon be able to record and look back on their virtual school day via Google Meet

Google Meet is adding a new setting that will allow administrators to enable their students to record meeting sessions. This is significant because it lets them go back and review it later. Think of this like voice recorders in university back in the day. Having pertinent information in its original, full-length form can empower students with different learning styles to excel in an at distance education environment. With Google recently massively improving Workspace for Education, this update comes as no surprise as they seek to implement more tools to make students feel “at home” in the virtual classroom.

Once enabled, all individuals in a call that have a Google Workspace for Education Plus license (formerly G Suite for Education) can visit the three dots ‘more’ menu at the bottom right of an active call, and click ‘Record Meeting’. Once said individual stops the recording using the same button (which would presumably automatically occur when the call is ended by the host as well), that recorded video chat is then saved to his or her Workspace for Education Google Drive account as you can see in the animation below.

Because each student has the ability to record everyone else in the video call, they will be presented with a message prior to enabling this feature that states the following:

Make sure everyone is ready

Recording a meeting without the consent of all participants may be illegal and actionable. You should obtain consent to record this meeting from all participants including external guests and guests who joined late.

I imagine that all schools will have to quickly draft up a consent form that is congruent with their state’s laws on this and have it signed by all participants or their parents before rolling the feature out to avoid any legal trouble and to protect the privacy of all parties.

It’s worth noting that regular users can already record meetings. Admins will notice that once this feature rolls out over the next two weeks for both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains, they will need to manually enable it for their students from the admin dashboard.

I would be interested to know – if you’re a Workspace for Education Plus admin, do you intend to implement the ability for each individual to record meetings for later review? Are there other nuances that need to be considered outside of individual consent to being recorded? Let us know in the comments!

Workspace Education Plus (formerly G Suite for Education) only!

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