What’s New in Microsoft Teams for Education | November 2020

TeamsEducationAs great as it is to see these advances and improvements in the application, it is frustrating that features like Breakout Rooms and Polls are not available for teachers in Channel Meetings. Channel meetings are the most efficient and visible way for teachers to plan meetings/lessons for their students, yet these interactive features aren't available through this method. The alternative to create Standard (Calendar) Meetings and invite students/Teams and the email address of the channel is not as straightforward for creating the event and permissioning of the recording.

In addition, the changes to storage of Meeting recordings in OneDrive/Sharepoint from Stream has created a number of significant issues for teachers. 

1. The 'Recordings' folder for Channel meetings is under the Files tab of the channel meaning that by default students have edit/delete permissions to all Channel meeting recordings. Just this week, I've had two teachers wondering where the recordings have disappeared to because students deleted them by accident. In order to change this, teachers have to manually change the permissions on all 'Recordings' folders in each channel where they host meetings, so that members have read-only/view access.
2. Many teachers were using Stream channels as a way of organising class lessons videos into one location. This is now much more difficult. Stream channels do not allow uploading of videos from OneDrive or Sharepoint directly. Therefore, a teacher must download the video/meeting recording from OneDrive/Sharepoint to their computer and upload it to Stream before they can add it to the existing Stream Channel, therefore defeating the purpose of changing the storage location and creating extra work for the teacher. Aside from embedding the various videos in a Sharepoint page, it is challenging to share in one place Channel meetings and lessons recorded in advance through Standard (Calendar) meetings.
3. Teachers now must pay attention and edit permissions on Meeting recordings and lessons recorded in advance through Standard (Calendar) meetings much more then they used to when all recordings were saved to Stream. I have found supporting teachers that the different storage locations for Standard vs. Channel meetings is also confusing for most teachers as they have to find individual recordings. When the recordings all saved to Stream, the type of meeting didn't change the storage location.

Hopefully, the new Stream web app will take some of these concerns into consideration and eliminate the issues. The change in the middle of a school year has been challenging for teachers.