It says I can record the meeting. Can I?

That’s a great question, and we all know that this one is going to fall under FOIP considerations. Here are some things you need to consider in order to record a lesson and share it:

Do you have any students in your class who are FOIP protected? Those students need to be protected regardless of the pandemic. Here are some things you need to do to protect those students.

-have them turn off their video feed and microphone during times when you are recording. This should be communicated to them in advance of the class so that they are not singled out in front of their peers regarding this. You might also decide that when you are recording all class members will turn off their video feed. Indeed, that will eliminate goofing around in front of the video camera and the entertainment of their peers. As always, this is your class, and you can operate this in your preferred way.  When recording is not occurring, it is wonderful to see faces and hear voices.

When you communicate with the family or foster family about the online classes, please discuss this topic so that the student knows we are doing everything we can to protect them, and they know what their role in this protection is.  Again, it is a great idea for teachers to conduct an unrecorded “pretend class” ahead of time so that kids and teacher are familiar with the program.

Who has access to the recordings?

This is important. If you created your meeting using calendar invitations, EVERYONE who received a calendar invitation to the session will AUTOMATICALLY have access to the recordings afterward. See the image below:

If you look at the above image carefully, you will see two new items you’ve likely never seen before in a calendar event. The one with the blue icon is the document containing the transcript of the chat from that session. The red icon contains the recorded video from the event.

If you use calendar to invite your students to the session, they ALL automatically have access to the recording afterward. (You can delete them, but the onus is there to make sure that happens).

Because in the image, I invited myself in order to generate the Google Meet link, I remain the only person with access to the recording unless I share it from my Google Drive, or load it to Google Classroom, or YouTube.

Alternatively, you can create the Google Meet link in Google Calendar without inviting anyone; it merely involves clicking on the “more options” link at the bottom of the event creation pop-up and then clicking the “add conferencing” dropdown menu.