Microsoft Teams in the Classroom – Enhancing the Learning Experience through Communication and Collaboration

Students, faculty and staff often face various collaboration and communication challenges when working together. To encourage the adoption of intelligent communications in schools and universities, Microsoft has developed Teams for Education and it comes with different, more education-specific features than the regular version. With education apps such as Class Notebook and Staff Notebooks, Teams streamlines everything you need for education into one platform.

Picture this: a bunch of students sitting in one room, sitting at their table and taking notes from a document projector. Do you feel reminded of your own time at school or university? Did you ever wonder how your educational journey could have changed if you were offered a modern communication and collaboration platform to easily access training material, connect with other classmates and work together on the next presentation? Or, if you missed a course how would you learn about your teacher’s recent presentation or the source material they were advising on?

In a modern education world, there are several questions teachers often think about – like, how do they get hundreds of students to really work together as a team on and off campus? The answer is easier than you might think. SoftwareONE believes most of you are already working with Microsoft applications like Outlook, the Office bundle, or OneDrive as part of an Office 365 subscription. Now, did you know that your Office 365 license also includes THE hub to revolutionize your thinking about modern teamwork and collaboration? That’s right, with Microsoft Teams, you have all you need right under your fingertips to digitize learning and education! Read how to Modernize How Your School Communicates & Collaborates.

Teaching has never been easier than it is with Microsoft Teams. Especially for education, Microsoft offers a feature set tailored to the needs of educators of all kinds such as Class Notebooks, Staff Notebooks and other education apps. All good things come for free and so does Microsoft Teams for Education as an integrated part of Office 365. Microsoft Teams is a digital hub that brings conversations, meetings, files and apps together in one place. Because it’s built on Office 365, schools benefit from integration with their familiar Office apps and services. It delivers enterprise-grade security and compliance, and is extensible and customizable to fit the needs of every school:

• Collaboration: Co-author files and share resources with built-in Office 365 apps.
• Communication: Stay connected with persistent chat, channel conversations, and meetings.
• Personalization: Personalize Teams with your favorite education and organization tools.
• Assignments: Create meaningful assignments, provide transparent guidance, and share rich feedback.
• Gradebook: Organize and track each class’ assignments and grades directly from a class Team.
• Notebooks: Create and store resources with OneNote in Teams.
• Third-Party Apps: Customize your experience with Flipgrid, Turnitin, MakeCode, and other learning tools.

As an educator you not only can find all resources in one hub but you can also streamline your communication in a staff team to collaborate on district-wide operations and initiatives or connect yourself with other educators through professional learning communities. In addition to that, you simply bring together students, employees, and parents to organize school and after-school activities.

Best practice has shown how easy students respond to Microsoft Teams. At Microsoft Ignite, Dr. David Kellermann, lecturer in the school of engineering at the University of New South Wales, reported that after initiating Teams in one of his courses in 2017, it took only 60 seconds (!) until the first students started responding and chatting in Teams.

By having everything students need to learn and interact in one single hub, students posts and engagements increased by 900%. While Microsoft Teams offers a completely new way to keep the education and learning process as lively and interactive as possible many teachers are concerned about losing their direct line to their students and not having a spot for questions and proper feedbacks. That`s where Microsoft Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) comes into play and where integrated systems can easily close the gap. Like the Question bot which Dr. Kellermann built and implemented to solve this issue. With this new kind of education bot in place students can open service tickets with their questions and get connected to their tutors.

Additionally, the bot tracks all question-answer pairings and fills a dynamic FAQ document that is also accessible from any mobile device. Within a short time, this process went from a zero configuration to a self-training A.I. also including material with QR codes to sort questions sent in by photos to the correct answer and tutors.

We are at the forefront of helping education institutions like yours transform their infrastructure to drive end-user satisfaction while minimizing IT spend. In order to remain attractive to new talent, it`s crucial to offer communications and collaboration solutions that enable a modern, productive environment – working from any device, any place without discontinuity and quality issues. Our Unified Communication and Collaboration specialists connect you with the tools to help you work as efficiently and effectively as possible, while getting the most value out of your IT investments both now and in the future.