Meet, Slide and Jamboard: Google's first trio for distance education

Meet, Presentations and Jamboard are a trio of apps from the Google Education universe that are of great benefit to teachers around the world. Pierre-Olivier Cloutier, secondary school teacher, presents them and talks about their use.

Through Pierre-Olivier Cloutier, secondary school teacher

The context of the last few months has created a feeling of urgency among several educators: to master a distance learning tool. Some have turned to Zoom, other worms Teams. Google was certainly not going to give up its place. Many were already familiar with Google Hangouts. Her little twin, Google meet, quickly made its rise. 

Paired with the tool Presentations (or Slides) and Jamboard (a whiteboard), this trio of applications from the GAFE (Google Apps For Education) universe has served several schools around the world. 

Google Meet - The center player

Like many of its ilk, Google Meet allows screen sharing. So someone who is in the meeting can easily take control of this function. Important element to know when addressing young people! For the teacher, this is the first step to boost a distance course. Note that the strength of Google applications is also found in the range of add-ons to download in the Chrome Web Store. Two very interesting additions are GridView, which allows you to see all the participants of a meeting, and Meet Attendance, which allows you to take attendance inside the meeting.

Note that Meet can generate an address of streaming (simple diffusion without interaction), which avoids slippages and distractions during the sessions. In this case, chat, microphones and cameras are disabled. With recent cases of hacking or Zoom Bombing, it can be reassuring to have this possibility. 

Google Slides (Presentations) - The ferryman

During a distance learning session, it becomes essential to target the essential content and energize the presentations. Google Slides (or Presentations) is therefore a must. The animation features offered have nothing to envy those of the giants Microsoft and Apple. To model content remotely, the use of animated sequences helps control the flow of information to students. 

The investment of time is well worth the effort. The interface of Slides in this area is very instinctive. To enhance the visual appearance of your presentations, several sites such as SlidesCarnival offer superb canvas. Because, let's face it, the basic templates in Google Slides are very simple.

Then, it becomes imperative to make static presentations interactive. The Slides tool meets this need with its “Q&A” functionality. 

By activating this function in Slides, the application generates a web address which is displayed at the top of the presentation. Students attending class then have access to a forum controlled by the presenter. 

The latter then decides whether or not to display the students' answers. This makes it possible to unblock the chat (Live Chat) and to reserve it for students who have comprehension questions or technical problems.

Google Jamboard - the winger in power

Any teacher who wants to model remotely must rely on a stable and reliable “whiteboard” type tool. Lots of teachers have been creative in recent weeks. Once again, it is a tool from the Google suite that allows us to complete our trio. Jamboard is often used as a reminder (or brainstorm) board for collaborative work, and several teachers have taken to using it on multiple devices to write directly on the screen like on a chalkboard in the classroom. ! This brilliant idea was shared with me by Meggie Blanchette, a mathematics teacher at Collège Reine-Marie in Montreal. Jamboard has multiple styli in different colors. It also allows you to import an image and write on it. Unfortunately, not possible for PDF. On the other hand, nothing prevents using the good old screenshot to generate images.

Once the modeling is completed on Jamboard, it can be exported in PDF and sent to the students. It can also be shared (like all types of Google documents) if the educational intention requires a collaborative forum. 

By combining these three tools, it's impossible to put together a lousy course for your students. Obviously, juggling these three platforms takes practice and patience. In the event that we could experience a second wave of confinement, it is better to take advantage of the coming months to experiment, improve and create.

Need to be accompanied?

Would you like to be guided to try these tools? Sign up to our CréaCamp SPRINT June 18 at 9 a.m. Quebec time (GMT-4)! We will deal with Jamboard and Presentations!