In Google Meet, your teachers can mute a student's microphone using the student tile'sMicrophone icon button. But there is no capability for teachers to turn off a student's camera. For home remote learnings, some students may dress or act inappropriately or have pets walking over the camera. Other students could be distracted from the student's camera feed.

Camera feeds for students can be distracting in Google Meet
Camera feeds for students can be distracting in Google Meet

The article shows how Safe Doc allows your teachers to disable a student's camera. The student cannot turn their camera feed back on by themselves for the rest of lecture session unless they refresh the page and rejoin the meeting.

If your school has yet to install Safe Doc, please get a 30 days trial first.

Use the magic /cameraoff chat command

Safe Doc introduces a magic chat command for your teachers to disable some students' cameras. Here is how it works.

  1. (Teacher) Find the email address of the student
  2. (Teacher) Open the chat side panel
  3. (Teacher) Type /cameraoff [email protected]. That is the /cameraoff command, a space and the student email.
  4. (Teacher) Click send.
  5. (Student) The camera is immediately turned off and the camera button is disabled (greyed out). The student cannot turn on by themselves.

Demo

In the following demo, the top window is the teacher's Google Meet window, and the bottom 3 windows are the students'. The teacher types in the /cameraoff command in the chat panel and clicks the Send button. Then the student Pat Paul's camera is immediately turned off and the camera button is disabled.

(The demo was based on the old Meet interface before 6/10/2021 but Safe Doc also works for the new Meet interface)

How to configure Safe Doc?

First of all, make sure you have deployed Safe Doc and read Safe Doc Configuration.

The magic command is managed by the policy EnableMeetCameraOffCommand. By default the policy is OFF, i.e. the chat command is not activated. You need to add and set the policy with value true in your configuration.

"EnableMeetCameraOffCommand": {
  "Value": true
}

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