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hangouts-for-schools

Due to COVID19, schools in a lot of countries have been closed. Teachers therefore lost contact with their classes overnight.

Do you work in a company that has a Google G Suite Business account? Then you can help teachers to reestablish some level of communication using Google Hangouts.

In order to use Hangouts a pupil needs to have a Google account. This repository contains a manual for parents of how to setup one.

It's recommended to set this up with the consent of the teacher.

chat (Google Hangouts)

create group

Set up a group on hangouts.google.com with e.g. the name "Schülerchat Klasse A. B.". Go to participant list on the top and add the exact google account name of the teacher and of each child belonging to this class. The account will appear as "Unknown" even though it exists, that's fine. Next a "Send Invite" popup appears. Confirm this. On the other end, the teacher/child now has to accept this invitation, by clicking on the three dots symbol on the left and then "Invites".

communicate between each child

Now pupils can see the chat messages and they can call the group. To call each other, they also have to invite each other first, same process as above. It's recommended to share the list of all email addresses in the chat, so children can find each other themselves. I pasted the list as image, so it's harder to distribute. Also I told the channel not to distribute to the outside.

video calls

However, there is a drawback, a group video call is limited to 10 people.

class video call (Google Hangouts Meet)

That's where Google Hangouts Meet comes in. With your G Suite Business account, setup a (recurring) meeting and invite all the Google accounts. Choose Hangouts Meet for the venue. The maximum number of participants is 250 here, which is more than enough. Also share the meeting link in the chat group e.g. 15 minutes before the meeting.

There is a catch here. After the children clicked on the meeting link you need to grant access to each. So make sure that you are logged in with your Google Hangouts Meet G Suite business account to confirm those requests.

whats next?

Google for education

For the longterm, a school might consider to register for "G Suite for education". Free of charge for public schools, it provides additional benefits:

  • no "granting access" required for Google Hangouts Meet meetings
  • the teacher can organize meetings herself and can prevent kids from muting her own microphone
  • Google Classroom for managing teaching and learning
  • etc.

Edulog

In the longterm and in Switzerland (some schools start after the summer holiday) a new platform called edulog.ch by educa.ch will be rolled out. Companies with an Umbrella agreement with educa.ch (like Microsoft, Google etc.) can then offer their services through the platform. Edulog is mainly an identity provider.