Google Meet Keeps Students & Teachers Connected at Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School

Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School is an all-girl, Catholic high school located in Chicago. Mother McAuley is the largest single gender school in Chicagoland. They empower young women to acknowledge their giftedness and to make decisions with a well-developed moral conscience.

The Challenge

Along with many other schools across the country, Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School had to adjust to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lauren Dowden, Director of Institutional Technology at Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School, knew the school needed a new solution for virtual meetings. They had about half of their students in the classroom and half at home doing virtual learning. Teachers were having a hard time getting the students in the classroom to communicate with the students at home because they couldn’t see or hear them.

When they switched to remote learning, they were trying to figure out how students and teachers could meet virtually without any issues. They discussed using YouTube live or Zoom, but those solutions had too many issues. Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School needed a video conferencing solution that was easy for students and teachers to use.

The Solution

Before Google Meet, Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School was already using Google Classroom for about five years. When it came time to choose a virtual meeting solution, Google Meet was the obvious choice for them. Google Meet integrates seamlessly with Google Classroom and allows teachers and students to collaborate without any issues.

“It’s so intuitive,” Dowden says. The students use the present now feature of Google Meet often to share slides or presentations. This is helpful because the content that the students are presenting is right in front of them and they don’t have to split it up between two different screens. Students also use the hand raising feature quite often, which has been extremely beneficial to teachers.

At first, Dowden introduced Chromebases for Google Meet to a few classrooms and now every classroom has one. Google Meet has allowed students and teachers at Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School to stay connected.

The Results

• Kept students and teachers connected during COVID-19 pandemic
• Gave students and teachers an intuitive and easy to use solution