Microsoft Teams Student Self-Service Guide for Educators
Microsoft Teams has become a central hub for education, offering a range of tools to facilitate online learning, collaboration, and communication. This guide provides educators with strategies and best practices to streamline their Teams setup each semester, focusing on efficient content management and student access to resources.
Leveraging SharePoint for Centralized Content Management
As an instructor, streamlining your Teams setup each semester involves efficient content management and easy student access to resources. One effective approach involves leveraging SharePoint, the underlying platform for file storage and collaboration in Microsoft Teams. SharePoint can act as a centralized hub for uploaded videos and other course materials.
Creating a Master SharePoint Site
Consider creating a "Master" SharePoint site or team. Within this site, you can create a dedicated "SharePoint Page" for each class you teach. This approach allows you to organize content logically and share it easily with other instructors and students. From this SharePoint site, you can set up pages that have content stored in the same site to make it as streamlined as possible.
Uploading and Organizing Videos
Instead of directly uploading videos to the Teams channel, which creates a SharePoint site for the team, upload them to Microsoft Stream. Microsoft Stream is a video management service that helps instructors arrange, make, store, share, and watch videos. Stream allows you to easily share videos with small groups of students, classes, and families outside of school. After uploading, set permissions and add the videos to Stream Groups/Channels of your choice. You can also set permissions for the folder instead of individual movie uploads.
Embedding Stream Videos in SharePoint Pages
Once your videos are uploaded to Stream and organized, you can embed them directly into your SharePoint pages. This creates a seamless experience for students, as they can access all course materials, including videos, from a single location.
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Addressing the "Home Page" in Teams
The "Home Page" in Teams, which is essentially a SharePoint page, can be customized to serve as a central access point for your uploaded videos. This provides a decent replacement to the Stream classic method where you would post a link to the stream channel in your Team. You can create a "SharePoint Page" for each of the classes that you teach, and then add that page, or share it with other instructors/students.
Optimizing Video Accessibility and Engagement
Accessibility is a crucial aspect of online learning. Microsoft Stream offers features to enhance video accessibility and engagement.
Turning on Captions
Ensure that captions are turned on for all your videos. This makes the content accessible to students who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as those who prefer to read along with the video. Live captions and subtitles, with translation options, are also provided by Microsoft.
Creating Playlists
To further enhance the viewing experience, create playlists within Stream. While the process may feel manual, organizing videos into a logical sequence can greatly improve student comprehension. Add the playlist to the SharePoint "Home Page" of the team.
Streamlining Team Setup Each Semester
Setting up a new team each semester can be time-consuming. Here's how to streamline the process:
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Copying Links to Teams
Once you have set up your master SharePoint site and organized your videos in Stream, you can easily copy the relevant links to your new Teams. Instead of rebuilding the playlist and home page for every team, copy the link to teams, and every future team that teaches the same topics. Upon creating a new team, you just need to add the Stream Channel link to your team and everything is setup (provided that you added access privileges to the new students/instructors to the channel).
Managing Permissions
When sharing content from SharePoint, you may need to grant access privileges to students. To avoid having to grant access to each individual file, set permissions for the folder instead.
Leveraging Other Microsoft 365 Tools
Besides Stream and SharePoint, several other Microsoft 365 tools can enhance the student self-service experience in Teams.
OneNote Class Notebook
Use OneNote Class Notebook to organize and manage your courses, course materials, and student work in one location. OneNote desktop is useful for education because you can keep your lesson plans and course content in your own digital notebook.
Microsoft Forms
Simplify assessment with Microsoft Forms. Create quizzes, surveys, and polls, track student progress, and collect feedback.
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Microsoft Planner and To Do
Use Microsoft Planner to organize and work on projects in a visual way. Microsoft To Do is an app that helps you organize tasks online.
Immersive Reader
Help readers develop their skills and understanding by using the Immersive Reader feature, which includes Read Aloud, grammar options, reading speed, and text preferences.
Microsoft Reflect
Create impactful check-ins to gain insights into your learners' well-being and build a happier and healthier learning community with Microsoft Reflect.
Utilizing AI-Powered Tools
Microsoft Teams for Education has a suite of tools and resources that enable educators and students to leverage the power of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning.
Reading Progress and Reading Coach
Microsoft Teams offers a free tool called Reading Progress that tracks and assists your class's reading proficiency. Reading Coach is a free tool that provides personalized, engaging, consistent and independent reading fluency practice.
Search Coach
Teachers can use Search Progress to assign students a Search Coach, which allows them to compile references they come across while researching a certain subject. Search Coach is a free tool for teaching information literacy.
Speaker Progress
With Speaker Progress, educators can easily create assignments for students to practice presenting and get real-time tailored coaching on their pace, pitch, filler words, pronunciation, repetitive language, use of sensitive phrases, eye contact, and body language.
Math Progress
Math Progress in Microsoft Teams supports learners in building foundational math skills with educator-led and assigned activities, dashboards, and insights.
Addressing Common Concerns
SharePoint Sharing Links
SharePoint tab in the Microsoft Teams doesn’t support the SharePoint Sharing links.
Accessing Content
There is no setting or way to allow to access everything with one-click to access everything in your Playlist.
Supporting Students with Learning Disabilities
Microsoft Teams for Education provides numerous opportunities for students with learning disabilities to enhance their learning. Learners with Dyslexia can benefit from digital tools such as Immersive Reader, Dictate, Editor, Picture Dictionary, and the To Do App.
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