With most schools worldwide still relying on remote learning setups due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google has been rolling out improvements to its education-focused services. Last week, it announced a bunch of new features coming to its Meet video conferencing tool, including the ability for teachers or hosts to end a meeting for everyone at once.
Google announced today that it is now rolling out that capability to Google Workspace customers. Starting today, organizers have two options when they are about to exit a meeting: they can either let the other participants stay on the call unsupervised or end the meeting for everyone at once.
When you click the end call button during a meeting, a dialogue box will pop up showing those two options before you can leave the call. If you choose to end the session for everyone, everyone else including those in breakout rooms will receive a notification that they've been ejected from the meeting. After that, the host must join the call again first before they can rejoin as well. Teachers can prevent participants from a previous meeting when they want to meet with their students by starting an entirely new video conference.
For now, this capability is limited to Workspace Education Fundamentals or Education Plus accounts, which are the new names for G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education following their rebranding last week. Google is also planning to introduce the new capability to other Workspace editions in the next few months.
