This article is written for Google Workspace for Education Administrators.
If your school enables Google Chat for teacher and student communications, you may find a problem: your teachers cannot reach to the students because they choose to block the teacher! Yes, Google Chat provides your students a feature to block someone they don't want to chat. Although blocking someone is an essential feature in many Chat apps, it creates some trouble in education environment.
Google does not provide the admin control or at least audit reporting capability for the blocking teachers. This article demonstrates how Safe Doc can remove the Block user feature in Google Chat. If you have yet to install Safe Doc, please get a 30-days trial.
What's the change?
The Block user feature in Google Chat can be easily found. It can be triggered in 3 places.
- Hover a user on the Chat lists and click the
context menu - Click the user and click the user name at the chat top bar.
- In the pop up chat dialog in the bottom right, click the context menu.
context menuSafe Doc removes the menus from your students' Chat app.
How to configure Safe Doc?
First of all, please have Safe Doc deployed to your students' Chrome browsers and read xFanatical Safe Doc Configuration.
Then add the policy BlockChatBlockUser into your Safe Doc policy configuration and set its value to true. This policy is by default OFF if its value is not set or false.
"BlockChatBlockUser": {
"Value": true
}
Limitation
This policy does not automatically unblock users. To do so, please ask the students to unblock your teachers in their blocking list following Google's documentation Block and report someone.
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Safe Doc
