MicrosoftHave you looked at the Teacher Training Pack website https://support.office.com/en-us/article/teacher-training-packs-7a9ee74a-8fe5-43d3-bc23-a55185896921
Teams it self will work in many configurations. I think the bigger issue is deciding how you want the Class Notebook to be setup, this is probably the greater concern that will then affect how you want to set up your teams. It's very hard to know what is the best method.
Next year my school is rolling it out to two year levels, about 250 students. I was initially keen to do have only 5 teams per year level done by homegroup, eg, Yr 7A, Yr 7B, Yr 7C, Yr 7D, and year 7D. Each team would be shared by their Math, English, Science teachers. It would mean each student is in only one team. When a new student arrives at school throughout the year they only need to be added to one team. But we decided against that because Teams Assignments does support multiple grade books. We also had difficulty setting up section group distribution in the class notebook.
Then we wondered about have 5 teams per year done by subject eg. Year 7 English, Year 7 Math etc. For example the Year 7 English team would have 125 students and all the English teachers. This idea had alot of merit, but again we weren't happy about Assignments and Class Notebook
We ended up deciding that we'd one team per class subject. So in other word, we'll have heaps of team. Yr 7A English, 7A Math, 7A Science etc. We won't be sure yet if that's the right decision, but it's good enough to get us started. It's going to be a big learning curve for us all. Certainly the administration is much harder. When a new student comes to school they needed to then be added to 5 teams etc.
Having said all that...
* I do wonder what the "Category" function of the Teams Assignments does and how this will be incorporated into the new grade book. perhaps it will better support multiple subjects to share a team.
* Assignments does allow you to individually select students when assigning assignments. It would be nice if you could set groups for this.
* About two months ago Microsoft did announce new abilities to do section group distribution in Class Notebook, so perhaps the issue we had with that has been resolved.
We'll review next year and reassess
The key annoyance we now have is just with enrolling students. There are a few strategies for that
A) School Data Sync is an option for some schools. But not ours unfortunately
B) All teachers could just manually invite their students (time consuming)
C) All teachers use the Join Code feature in their first class for the year. - This is what we're going to do.
There are a few things I think Microsoft could do to improve this process:
A) Allow teams to match their membership. Eg. If you are Member of 07A English then you automatically become a member of 07A Math
B) Perhaps this could be done using user groups like sharepoint does.. or
C) Perhaps it could be done with some kind of super Join code that enables users to join multiple teams at once.
Either way, I'm super excited for the ups, downs and challenges that will come next year. There's enormous scope to do some great learning activities with the students. I expect the first month to be very difficult. Microsoft have shown that they are rapidly improving the platform too, which is a good sign of further improvements to come
