Microsoft Teams provides collaboration tools perfect for many situations, allowing groups to easily share information, chat with each other, collaborate on projects, and work more productively. Teams is especially useful for collaboration in the classroom and the office, keeping faculty, staff, and students focused and working together efficiently. Consider the following 5 tips to get the most out of teams in your classroom!
1: Teams can help keep your communication organized.
Do you have students, grad students, fellow researchers, or co-instructors? Create a Teams channel for each group dedicated to communicating expectations, deadlines, and other critical information. Do you use small groups in your classes? Give each small group their own private channel. You control who is a member of each team, how they can respond, who can delete conversations and files, etc.
Learn more:
- How to get organized and stay productive with Microsoft Teams!
- Communicate in a Team
- Use Microsoft Teams for collaboration
- Microsoft Teams: Create a Team for your Course and Invite Students
2: Teams can make small-groups more productive, and better yet, more transparent when it comes to judging effort and contributions among team members.
Create a Private Teams channel for each small group. This allows each group to have a space for communications, file-sharing, scheduling, and meeting via video chat. As the Instructor, you will be able to see the version histories of files, and the development of group-project artifacts in real-time as your students work on them!
Each private channel can have customized tabs at the top. This allows you to pre-populate web-links, applications, files, and other information that you want to share with your students.
Learn more:
- Communicate in a Team
- Microsoft Teams: Create a Team for your Course and Invite Students
- Microsoft 365 Teams: Add a Connector
- Microsoft 365 Teams PC: Add a Channel
3: Teams meetings allow guest speakers from outside of Penn State to easily communicate with your students.
Meetings in Teams include audio, video, and screen sharing. Teams Meetings are one of the many ways to collaborate in Teams. And you don’t need to be a member of an organization (or even have a Teams account!) to join a Teams meeting—just look in the invitation for instructions about calling in.
Learn more:
- Join a meeting in Teams
- Microsoft 365 Teams: Create Live Events in Teams
- Best Practices for External Presenters in your Teams Live Event
4: There are no time constraints on Teams communications, use video-chat and speak with your colleagues and students whenever you need to.
Teams allows you to “Meet Now” using a video call. Meet with colleagues or students as necessary during those busy times of the academic year. Meet with your students for scheduling or class-related needs; meet with your colleagues for impromptu meetings on critical topics.
Meet Now is a simple and easy way to keep connected with your students and co-workers.
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5: Share information, stay organized, and help your students succeed with applications!
Teams allows you to customize the tabs at the top of each channel. There are literally hundreds of available applications that can be included to customize your student’s experience. Applications such as Flipgrid, Kahoot!, and even Microsoft’s own OneNote notebooks are available to help you deliver just the right material in just the right way to help your students succeed.
As an example, OneNote is a digital note-taking app that provides a single place for keeping all of your notes, research, plans, and information — everything you need for your classes or research.
Other applications can deliver YouTube videos directly to your Teams channel, or you could use something like Planner to assist your student with their organizational needs.
Customized applications are great ways to make each Teams channel unique.
Learn more: