Microsoft Teams for Education: How to Create & Manage

Collaboration. Communication. Critical Thinking. Creativity. Microsoft Teams does them all. Students, teachers, and staff can work seamlessly together, create content, and share resources all from a single, easy-to-learn and simple to use platform. Through Microsoft Teams, teachers can engage students with virtual face-to-face connections and activities, and it is free with a valid school email address. 

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Making the transition to remote learning

According to Microsoft, more than 150 million students, faculty, institutional leaders, and teachers have been actively using Microsoft Education products—with Teams for Education as that hub—to engage students in remote learning during the pandemic. Microsoft Teams is a digital hub that brings conversations, content, assignments, and apps together in one place, enabling teachers to create vibrant learning environments.

Classroom learning can happen just about anywhere as you can use Microsoft Teams from your desktop or on the web, on your iOS, Android, tablet, or laptop device.

Create and manage your secure online classroom

Driving student engagement and focused learning while they are outside of the classroom can be a challenge, especially for those that are moving to distance learning for the first time.

 

  • Collaborate:  Co-author files and share resources with built-in Office 365 apps.
  • Communicate:  Stay connected with persistent chat, channel conversations, and meetings.
  • Personalise:  Personalise Teams with your favourite education and organisation 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:  Customise your experience with Flipgrid, Turnitin, MakeCode, and other learning tools.

How to Create a Class

Accessing Teams is simple. You will need a Microsoft Office 356 account. Sign in to Office.com with your school email address and password. Go to Microsoft Teams.

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Click on Join or Create a team at the bottom left of the screen.

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Select Create a team.

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Choose to Build a team from scratch.

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Select Class from the options presented to you.

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Give the Class a Name and complete the optional Description, then click Next.

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The Class is created. Now you can search for and add Students and Teachers from your school to the Class.

Your Class will have a generic profile page but this is one of the many things you can manage and edit.

Change your Class profile picture

  • Click on the pre-set profile image to Change the Team picture.
  • You can select from the pre-loaded examples or choose to Upload your own image.

Set up a Class Notebook

  • Click to Set up a One Note Class Notebook.
  • Click Next.
  • Select which item you would like the Notebook to contain from the options or create your own using the Add section option at the bottom of the list.
  • Once created you can add materials in the Collaboration Space along with your students.
  • Only you as the teacher can add content to the Content Library.

Set your status

You may not want students knowing you are online as they will certainly try and contact you. By clicking on your profile image in the top right of the screen you can set your status to busy, available or Do not disturb from the options available.

Hold a Video Meeting

Microsoft Teams is a great platform to connect with students virtually and gives you as the teacher control of the meeting. Simply click Meet now under the message box to start a live meeting or Schedule a meeting for the future. Members of the Class will see an invitation for the meeting in their calendar if you decide to schedule it for later.

Menus explained:

Posts 
Shows posts from you and your students in the Class. You can type and format these posts using the buttons below the text box. If you make the post an announcement you can add background images for more personalisation. Other post options include, formatting, attach a file, add an emoji, giffy or sticker, instigate a video meeting, stream content, praise a student, add a YouTube video, and you can add apps too.

Files
Where you can upload files for your Class. This provides a shortcut to find Class documents.

Class Notebook 
This is a OneNote Class Notebook that can be used to distribute materials and collaborate.

Assignments
Set an assignment or a quiz in this area and assign to individual students or multiple students.

Activity
View all your Teams Activity.

Chat
Chat with a group or individuals. The chat tab is a great space for announcements, class
discussions and questions.

Apps
Add Apps to the Classroom menu as appropriate.

Need more help?

Further helpful guides can be found in the Dataspire Resource Centre or via Microsoft Education.

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