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As students in higher education we often have group work that requires us to collaborate and meet in order to complete group assignments. Meeting face-to-face can be very inconvenient for many of us that have to juggle work, school, and family. Meeting face-to-face means that you will have to drive across town, schedule a baby sitter, or postpone important things because time is against you and this group work has to be completed…soon. There are several online applications that allows you to have group meeting like Skype, and Zoom but today let us look at my favourite tool for having meetings online – Google Hangouts Meet.

All you need to use Google Meet is a Gmail address which is easy to set up if you don’t already have one. Now let me tell you about the steps in setting up a meeting in Google Meet. Please note that you can only access Google Meet using the Google Chrome browser.

1. Sign into your Gmail account.
2. Click on the G-Suite icon in the upper right hand corner of Google Chrome and click on the Calendar icon.
3. Select the date and time for your meeting by clicking on the time slot
4. Give your meeting a title and a short description if you like
5. Invite your group members to the meeting by inserting their email addresses
6. Then click send email, which will advise the group members of the date and time for the meeting.
7. Click Send and you are done

Quite simple if you ask me. Now let us look at actually using Google Meet.

After the meeting is set up and the email sent, member of the group may accept the meeting just to notify you that they received the invite. The email sent to each group member has a contact a link to the meeting room, a telephone number that a member who has no internet access or computer at the time can dial into, and a pin number that a group member can use to access the meeting without using the link. So say for instance after you sent the original email you want to invite other members to the meeting; you can just give them the pin number, they go to Google Meet site and join the meeting using that pin. The same goes for dialling in to the meeting. Of course persons that dial in would only have access to audio and no video.

As soon as all persons (or most) are have signed or called into the meeting, this is where the magic happens. Up to 50 persons can have a meeting in Google Meet. You can decide whether you want the other members of the meeting to have access to your audio and/or video while you are in the meeting at any given point. So say for instance you want to speak with someone in the room you are in, or you want to take a phone call without persons in the meeting hearing your conversation. You can mute both your audio and video and members of the meeting will neither hear nor see you even though you can hear and see them, if they have their audio and video on. You get the drift?

Now for the actual meeting. Providing that everyone’s audio is available you can now have your discussions and plan out your group project. Also there is a chat box in the right hand side of the meeting browser that you may type while others are speaking especially if you would like to say something but do not want to disturb the person who is speaking at the moment. So you can communicate by text and audio in the very same application.

Google Meet also has a very cool option where you can present whatever you have on your computer screen for other members of the meeting to view. So you are working on or reading a document and would like the rest of the group to see it. You simply click on the Present Now icon to the lower right hand corner of the meeting browser screen and present your entire screen or a window on your computer. You and your group members can now discuss this document, spreadsheet, or presentation together. Really cool…right?

Google Meet is a great app to work collaboratively on group projects. It is easy to set up and meeting and easy to sign or call into. You can get a lot done without having to meet face-to-face all the time. Group members can be anywhere in the world and still work together to get that Grade A project done.  G-Suite provides us with several other sharing and collaborative tools like Google Docs and Google Slides that can be used in conjunction with Google Meet and we will look at those in the next blog post.

Watch this short video to learn some more about the wonders of Google Meet.