I have a web link. Now What?

 This tutorial is going to assume that you have your content for the class ready to go. That may involve a slide deck, a website, a conversation or it may be you reading a book to your class. “Content” can mean almost anything. You could perform a science lab for students to watch. Content has no limit.

Ten minutes prior to your Meet session, go to the link you generated in your calendar. If you don’t have it handy, open your Google Calendar, click on the event, and copy the link. Paste it into your browser where you type web addresses.  (The blue text that says “Join Hangouts Meet” is a live link – you can just click on it). You should then find yourself at a site that looks similar to this image:

 

Click the “Join Now” button, and wait for your students to join. The screenshot below shows what you are likely to see after you join – except you can thank your lucky stars that it will be your own face you see, and not me! 😉

You will hear a chime each time a student joins your meeting. Greet each student as they log in. There are a few reasons for this:

-We do that every day when our kids arrive at school, it’s manners.

-It lets you know that they can hear you. (It also lets them know how loud you are and they can adjust their volume)

-It lets you hear them when they respond.

-If you can hear them, let them know and ask them to mute their microphone. (They’ll figure out how)

– If you can’t hear them respond, you have that information. They may be able to adjust their mic settings, or they may simply be only able to hear, not speak back. That’s easily worked around using the “chat” feature which we will discuss in the next module.

– It allows you to instruct them to turn off their microphones. Having their microphones on will ruin the audio. The more microphones that are on at one time, the more the audio grows fuzzy. Only two people can talk at one time, so those not speaking should have microphones off.

– You may want to have a conversation right at the start of your first session with students about how you are going to approach the “raising of hands” in the online environment. This course has some suggestions for that which will also be in the next module when we discuss the “chat” feature.