You can make the most of Google Meet with your students with the best and most fun Google Meet Ideas for Teachers to lighten up your online classes.
Even after the Pandemic, teachers and students still interact with Google Meet but not as it was at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Google Meet is a video conferencing service that serves various purposes, especially student-teacher interaction.
Individuals and business owners also use Google Meet to hold important video and audio meetings.
In this article have taken time to discuss the 15 Google Meet ideas for teachers that you can follow to illuminate your educational game and make distance learning for kids fun.
What Is Google Meet?
According to Wikipedia, Google Meet is a video communication service developed American multinational corporation, Google..
The video conferencing service was only available to enterprise customers but in 2020, Google announced that the video communication service was avialbel all users. The app was designed for hosting vidoe meetings.
Google Meet is on Google Playstore and App Store and it’s free for users to access.
What Are The Google Meet Ideas For Teachers
- Begin the class with innovative check-ins
- Draw and share
- Play Pictionary with your students
- Make your kids read stories/chapters.
- Let your students share something with the class.
- Lunch with your students
- Take your kids on virtual trips on the field.
- Sing songs and let your students participate
- Play dress up once a week
- Allow them to tell jokes.
- Conduct science or construction experiments, “Do it at home.”
- Invite parents and teachers to a virtual “guest speaker” session
- Encourage your students to be active on the Scavenger Hunt.
- Create discussion groups among your students
- Hold a talent show now and then.
Begin the class with innovative check-ins
“Begin the class with innovative check-ins”.
Irrespective of their age, kids often don’t know how they feel, and to help them in a motivational way to speak about how they feel, you will have to begin the day by asking them to check in to the online class with diverse check-ins.
You can assign how your students/kids check in based on a particular emoji, an animal, or whether they feel like asking them to tell why they have chosen their check-ins. This way, you may get to know what the students are up to in their minds and decide the best way to approach each of them throughout the day.
Google Meet is a great way to share your face and things on your computer screen with other people and put this into practice by allowing your kids to draw and direct drawing too. As a teacher, you can ask your children to follow you as you sketch and go step by step to walk with you at a similar pace.
Targeted drawings help kids draw and understand things better, but they are also known to improve their listening skills and teach them to follow you. You can also give them the freedom to draw anything so that they can get creative after a few lessons.
Play Pictionary with your students
If you want to use drawing as a tool for your students to learn better, there are some Pictionary that you can try out. You can use Google Jamboard in Meet as a whiteboard that your students can draw on while other members of your class guess what is being drawn. Students can take turns drawing and guessing, and this virtual Pictionary can be made fun in the same way.
In the same way, you can also play charades without drawing.
Make your kids read stories/chapters.
Learning to read is one of the most important things you can teach a child. While you are video chatting with your students, you can have one of them learned in the class. It can be anything: stories, chapters, or parts of them. You can also have students take turns reading so all of your students can improve their reading and listening skills.
This is an important point in the Google Meet ideas for teachers, because Google Meet is a great feature for video conferencing with multiple people. You can change the layout of your Google Meet session so that only the active speaker is shown in front.
This will prepare your students for public speaking so that they won’t hesitate to speak in front of others when they return to their everyday lives.
Not all students act the same; some may be open-minded while others are shy when a camera is placed in front of them. To help your children adapt to the new standard of distance learning, you can ask your students to tell them something special and take turns sharing it.
You can encourage your students to share what they did during the day, bring their pets, talk about them, or do conversational activities.
Lunch with your students
To make distance learning easier for your students, you can have lunch with them as you would at school. This is a great way to keep track of what your students are doing, encourage them to eat healthily, and help them connect with other children.
Take your kids on virtual trips on the field.
While you can do pretty much anything you can do in a real classroom in Google Meet, it doesn’t include taking field trips and, without a doubt, the most fun activity. Do not worry! There are many places you can take your kids to zoos, aquariums, farms, and museums. Here is a list of places to take your kids on a virtual excursion:
- San Diego Zoo
- Stellarium: a virtual planetarium
- Monterey Bay Aquarium
- Georgia Aquarium
- National Aquarium
- Fresh farm 360
- Discovery Education
- Google Art & Culture
You can access any of the virtual tours above for free and search the web to find out more. To accompany your children on virtual excursions, you can use Google Meet’s native Chrome Tab feature (share a Chrome tab), which allows you to share your screen with your students’ screens with audio.
Sing songs and let your students participate
It is known that children become more involved when there is a musical activity. If you’ve identified your students for a long time, you can have a regular song that you and your children sing along to from time to time. You and your students can get together by singing nursery rhymes, popular age-appropriate hits, and familiar tunes to create a new song.
Play dress up once a week
Getting dressed is both a fun exercise and a learning experience. You can pretend to be someone else for a day, and you can be anything from a superhero to a model. You can perform costumes and role-play for your students to improve their relationship skills and character traits.
Children also learn a thing or two about the person or profession they are in, which gives them a new opportunity to teach them different things. By playing someone else’s character for a limited amount of time, children develop a better understanding of other people’s feelings, motivate them, and socialize with other children their age.
Allow them to tell jokes.
Besides singing and getting dressed, you can also tell jokes and get your kids to lighten up the atmosphere of your virtual classroom. When you get it right, you can quickly increase the effectiveness of your witty phrase jokes. If you write your jokes well, your students will listen more carefully, wondering whether it is a joke or a story that you should take seriously. This is an important part of this list of Google Meet ideas for teachers.
Conduct science or construction experiments, “Do it at home.”
You can ask your students to use the information they have at home to prepare their science projects. Students can ask their parents for help. However, if you want to help them yourself, you can schedule a personal Google appointment with the student to guide them through creating their project.
For younger children, an alternative to science projects might be to build something out of Lego blocks. You can ask your students to create something overnight and display their models in the next class.
Invite parents and teachers to a virtual “guest speaker” session
Many schools have their version of the Take Your Special Dad / Friend To School day that you can use to teach your students about various jobs and how these professionals live.
To add a new perspective to distance learning, host the Bring Your Parents Day on Google Meet by inviting parents to be guest speakers for the day and asking them to share a thing or two about their job or profession. You can also add other teachers to speak for a session to make your class fun and interactive.
Encourage your students to be active on the Scavenger Hunt.
While funny jokes and mind games are undoubtedly fun, kids should also participate in physical activities to stay healthy and fit while staying indoors. Hence, you can allow your students to participate in a scavenger hunt game and assign them a list of things with certain characteristics like shape, colour, length, sound, and what they feel.
This is where you can prepare to submit ideas for the scavenger hunt and let your kids find all of the items listed overnight.
Create discussion groups among your students
As a teacher, you can create study groups and assign students to discuss a specific topic or do their homework together. Creating focus groups can be a structured way to teach your students how to study together so they can develop more ideas than individually.
With Google Slides and Google Meet, you can manually create multiple study groups for your students and assign them to different groups.
Hold a talent show now and then.
You can assign a day or part of a week in a week to organize talent shows for your students. Talent shows can be an innovative way to see how your kids are doing and give them an idea of what you can individually teach them.
You can ask your students to prepare and share an activity that they want to do in front of other students, such as teaching aloud, a magic trick, an art project, playing a musical instrument, singing, or dancing.
Conclusion.
You can use the Google Jamboard in Meet to create a forum for students to post their ideas and see what they want to know more about. You can then follow, research, and teach the shared topics.
