Google Meet is an excellent app to have virtual meetings or hold online classes. And especially right now with the ongoing pandemic, Google Meet has proven to be the app of choice for a lot of organizations and schools. The user-friendly interface of Google Meet offers makes it really easy to host online meetings or classes on it.
But unfortunately, there are a few features that users feel the app should offer but doesn’t. Thankfully, one of the upsides of using Google Meet is that users have an abundance of third-party Chrome extensions at their disposal to augment their Google Meet experience.
One such extremely useful extension, especially for teachers is the Google Meet Classroom extension that adds a Whiteboard to Google Meet.
Go to the Chrome Web Store and search for Google Meet Classroom extension or click here to open it directly. Then, click on the ‘Add to Chrome’ button to install the extension.
A confirmation dialog box will appear on the screen. Click on ‘Add extension’ to confirm and install it on your browser. The extension icon will appear on the Address Bar of the Chrome browser.
How to Use Whiteboard in Google Meet
Once you have installed the extension to your browser, it will be ready to use in Google Meet. Go to meet.google.com and join or create a meeting as usual. When you enter the meeting, you will see a ‘Whiteboard’ option next to the ‘Captions’ option on the call toolbar. Clicking on it will open the Whiteboard. But the whiteboard is not an interactive one and just opening it will not make it visible to others.
You will have to use the Present feature of Google Meet to make the whiteboard visible to other participants in the meeting. This also means that other participants can only see the contents of the whiteboard and not contribute anything to it.
Click on the ‘Present now’ icon on the call toolbar.
When the context menu appears, choose the option ‘A chrome tab’ to share your screen.
Now when the dialog box displaying all the active chrome tabs opens, select the tab with Google Meet, i.e. the tab where the meeting is occurring and then click on the ‘Share’ button.
Your Google Meet screen will become visible to other participants in the meeting. Click on the ‘Whiteboard’ icon whilst in the sharing session and your whiteboard will open and be visible to everyone in the meeting. Anything you write on it will be seen by everyone in real-time.
You can write text, math formulae, as well as doodle in the whiteboard. Afterward, exit the whiteboard and click on ‘Stop Presenting’ to stop sharing your screen.
The Google Meet Classroom Extension adds a whiteboard to Google Meet that can be immensely helpful during a meeting, especially for teachers taking online classes right now. And the extension makes it quite straightforward and easy to use the whiteboard without any bells and whistles to make things complicated.
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