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business and education

Google Meet is here to host your video meetings, for free

Google Cloud announced it’s making Google Meet, Google’s premium video-conferencing solution, free for everyone with availability rolling out over the coming weeks. Starting in early May, anyone with an email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the same features available to G Suite’s business and education users, such as simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including the expanded tiled view.

“With the lines blurred between work and home, Google Meet can offer the polish needed for a work meeting, a tiled view for your online birthday party and the security needed for a video meeting with your doctor,” said Javier Soltero, VP of G Suite. “We’re in the middle of a significant worldwide shift impacting communication from the workplace to schools to the home. People want familiar, secure tools that they can use across all facets of their lives.”

Google has invested years in making Meet a secure and reliable video conferencing solution that’s trusted by schools, governments and enterprises around the world, and in recent months has accelerated the release of top-requested features to make it even more helpful. Whether it’s hospitals supporting patients via telehealth, banks working with loan applicants, retailers assisting customers remotely, or manufacturers interacting safely with warehouse technicians, businesses across every industry are using Meet to stay connected.…Read More

P21: Rethink testing for future success

Today’s high-stakes tests are inadequate tools for measuring the kinds of skills students will need for success in the global, technology-driven workplace, according to a group of key business and education leaders. The group, called the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), has issued a new report calling on national and state policy makers to ratchet up efforts to design and implement new assessments that can effectively measure these skills.

P21’s new report, "The Assessment of 21st Century Skills: The Current Landscape," highlights progress in the United States and abroad toward developing the "means to measure complex, higher-order thinking skills." The report is accompanied by a new online tool designed to help assess these skills.

The report also notes that educational institutions around the world are only just beginning to create such assessments. But researchers point to examples they consider representative of the best testing models for information and communication technology (ICT) learning skills.…Read More