Recently, I did a full tutorial on Google Meet for teachers, and a couple of people have mentioned that they’re having problems trying to share audio and a PDF or document at the same time. So, I’ve got two fixes for you that have worked for me.
What’s the audio problem on Google Meet?
Let me just show you what the problem is exactly that some people are experiencing on Google Meet.
When you go to present now, you’ve got the three options:
- tab
- window
- screen
When you go to tab, there is an option to share your audio just here in the bottom left-hand corner, but this requires the audio to be within a tab in Google Chrome. When you want to share a window, you don’t get this option anymore, there is no longer a tick button, and if you go to your entire screen, it’s the same. So it’s only exclusively for when you’re sharing a tab.
Solution No.1
The first solution to this problem is using Google Drive. I’m going to share the PDF of the class activity with my students before we listen to the audio. I’ve made a folder on Google Drive, and I’m going to share the PDF in this folder. On this same file, I’m going to right-click and click “get link.” I want to make sure that everyone that receives this link can view the document. Copy the link, open the chat function in Google Meet and paste that link to my students. If they were in this call, the students would be able to see the PDF on their own computers.
The next step is then to share the audio. To do this, we’re going to find the listening mp3. I’m going to share this in Chrome. Drag it and pop it into a tab in Chrome. So initially, when you drop it, it will start playing automatically so stop that. When you go to present now on your Google Meet call, on tab, you’ll now see that one of your tabs has become the listening file. So again, make sure you’ve got the Blue Tick box checked and press share, and then your students will then be able to hear this listening.
Solution No.2
If you don’t want to share any documents with your students directly, then this second solution will work for you. To do this, we’re going to use Google Slides.
We’re going to write the questions that you might have on your PDF into this presentation slide. Go to insert at the top here and go to insert audio. Now, this is going to pull audio from Google Drive. So again, that folder that we had created for the class, put that audio file in there.
I’ve got my audio file and my question, and those two things are in the same place. So I’m just going to go back to my call and present now, go to Tab, and you’ll see that my presentation is now in the Google Chrome tab options. You’ll be able to play this audio to your students, and your students will then be able to hear it. And if I go to slideshow, then make it nice and big. My students can now see the questions and they can hear the audio.
Thank you for learning about two solutions for Google Meet’s audio sharing problem.