Welcome to our regular “What’s New in Microsoft EDU” update and thank you so much for being part of our growing community! With the school year soon coming to a close in the Western Hemisphere, we want to share some great new updates that we’re excited to share with you, so here’s what’s new this month. Enjoy!
May Topics:
3. Learning Accelerators updates
6. Teams for Education Updates
1. Clipchamp coming to education customers
We are excited to announce that Clipchamp, a video editing tool that empowers educators and students to create engaging videos, will be available for Microsoft 365 Education with our A3 and A5 licenses. Starting on June 23rd , 2024, our education customers can access Clipchamp and start making amazing videos with ease.
Clipchamp is designed to make video creation easy for everyone, regardless of skill or experience level. You can combine video clips, images, and audio files with text and effects to create videos worthy of sharing. Whether it’s recording experiments, presenting research, or producing multimedia projects, Clipchamp enhances student engagement and learning outcomes.
Clipchamp also helps students develop future-ready skills, such as communication, creativity, and collaboration. With its user-friendly interface, Clipchamp makes video editing accessible to learners of all levels, empowering them to explore and express their ideas effectively.
Clipchamp is seamlessly integrated with Microsoft 365, so you can store your videos in OneDrive and SharePoint and watch or share them with Microsoft Stream. You can also use centralized IT controls, single sign-on, and security features within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
Clipchamp is more than just a video editor. It’s a canvas for imagination to flourish. To learn more about Clipchamp and how to get started, visit our website or check out our video tutorials.
2. AI and Teams EDU for Educators
Using generative AI to create rubrics in Assignments
Rubrics are a useful tool to communicate the expectations for the assignments to the students, and to provide an easy and effective way for the educator to grade and give specific feedback to the students. However, creating detailed rubrics can take a lot of time. With generative AI integrated into Assignments, you just need to enter what you want the rubric to assess, and Assignments will suggest criteria for you and complete the rubric for you.
You have the control as the educator, and you can add more levels or criteria and let AI fill out a first draft for you.
When: Rolling out now
Using generative AI to create instructions in Assignments
For Assignments Instructions, we are examining the information and giving multiple suggestions for how to enrich the content, such as adding more details, adding learning objectives, emphasizing key concept and even making your assignments more interesting. The educator always has the choice and can generate different options, and after the content is created, can always make further edits and updates to the content.
When: Rolling out now
Using generative AI to create modules in Classwork
Classwork is a new app in Teams that helps you manage your curriculum and lets educators create and organize class resources such as Assignments, Files, Links, Channels, Class Notebook pages, and more. With AI enabled Classwork module generation, educators can get assistance creating a course outline and drafting modules and descriptions based on the subject, student grade level, and class learning objectives. The educator is always in the driver’s seat and can choose to edit, delete, or regenerate modules before adding them to Classwork.
When: Private Preview in May
Reading Progress – AI passage generation
As announced recently, we are excited to share new capabilities for AI passage generation Educators can now generate a passage directly in Reading Progress, allowing them to leverage insights to personalize it based on the needs of their class and individual students. Passage generation offers the option to select a topic, age, length, and language. Further, educators can easily adjust the complexity of the passage once it has been generated.
When: Available Now
Reading Progress – AI Comprehension Question generation
Comprehension is a critical pillar for reading fluency but often requires a considerable amount of time from educators to create questions. To better support educators, we have built a new feature to generate comprehension questions based on a specific reading passage. Educators can choose the number of questions and then review them, make any necessary edits, and publish them to students.
When: Available Now
3. Learning Accelerator updates
Speaker Progress now in private preview
Speaker Progress joins our suite of Learning Accelerator tools to help students develop a key future ready skill – presenting and public speaking! Students consistently rank public speaking as a top cause of anxiety and educators tell us that creating opportunities for presenting in class is time consuming.
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. The educator can customize which tips are shown to students and students can get immediate feedback and see rehearsal report with their top strengths and opportunities for improvement.
Educators can review student speeches and see insights on how their students are progressing over time in key speech skills. Building presentation and public speaking skills has never been more important – in the age of AI being able to effectively communicate is one of the soft skills that will set students up for lifelong success. Sign up for our preview at https://aka.ms/SpeakerProgressSignUp.
When: Private Preview available to join now! https://aka.ms/SpeakerProgressSignUp
4. Get ready for summer with Reading Coach
What are your plans for keeping students reading through the summer? How about using Reading Coach? Today, we are announcing “Unlock characters and settings” that empowers learners to get a new character or story setting for every 20-minutes of reading. Learners can even trade characters / settings from a whole new collection.
To gets started with Reading Coach – for school or home use, go to https://coach.microsoft.com
Also, in preparation for summer professional development, educators can now take the Reading Coach Microsoft Learn course at https://aka.ms/readingcoachcourse
We’ll be cooking up more features for summer and year-round engaged reading. Stay tuned and we’ll be back with more.
5. Reflect updates
Following Earth Month and just in time for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're excited to introduce new ways for learners to explore social and emotional skills through engaging stories and coloring pages centered around nature. In Reflect, learners can now take brain breaks, enhance reading fluency with Immersive Reader, and engage with essential life skills.
We've enriched our activities collection with intriguing tales of wildlife and nature's wisdom: from dolphin friendships to elephant empathy, and penguin teamwork, uncovering the fascinating behaviors of various animals!
Each story is paired with a corresponding coloring page, enriching the learning journey, promoting tranquility, and encouraging learners to apply these insights to their daily lives.
Explore it now at https://reflect.do/stories. Also, Reflect is available in every class in Microsoft Teams, and can be seamlessly integrated into your school LMS like Canvas, Schoology, Moodle, D2L Brightspace, and Blackboard Learn. Learn more about integrating Reflect with your LMS.
When: Available now
6. Teams for Education updates
Teams Assignments with Learning Accelerators integrated with your LMS
Connect Class Teams and add Teams Assignments right into your LMS assignments list where students can launch and complete them, and sync grades automatically back to the LMS.
Teams assignments LTI brings Reading Progress, Microsoft Forms, Whiteboard, OneNote Pages, and all of the new generative AI features of Teams Assignments to your LTI 1.3 compliant LMS!
Sign up now if you are interested in joining the Preview, coming soon: https://aka.ms/LMSPreview
When: Preview Coming later this month
7. Microsoft Forms Updates
Form/quiz data sync to Excel
Whether you're managing a quiz for a specific subject or a form for various school activities, you can now easily access all your responses in Excel for the web. New responses will sync automatically in real-time, allowing you to keep working on your existing spreadsheet without missing a beat, while also leveraging Excel’s robust functions to analyze and evaluate your class's performance.
When: Available now
Embed Forms and callouts into Stream videos
Now, you have the capability to insert a form or quiz directly into a Stream video. As the video plays to a specific moment, the form or quiz will appear to the students. Once they've completed the form or quiz, they can continue watching the video. This feature provides teachers with a new way to enhance engagement and assess comprehension in real-time.
When: Available now
Pre-fill link
Teachers can now pre-fill some default answers to a form. Such as in a course enrollment registration for the new semester, instead of requiring students to manually enter professor's name or course ID, teachers can use the pre-fill link feature in Microsoft Forms. This not only saves students time in filling out the form but also enhances data accuracy. (Note: Pre-fill link will start to roll out for EDU starting this month. Initially, it will be only available for forms, with quiz functionality will be enabled later.)
When: Rolling out this month
And finally, just to recap all the news we have for you this month, here’s a quick review of all the features that are generally available or are rolling out now:
1. Clipchamp in EDU – coming in July for A3 and A5 licenses!
2. AI and EDU
- Generate rubrics are rolling out globally
- Generate assignment instructions are rolling out globally
- Reading Passage generation has rolled out globally
- Reading Progress comprehension question has rolled out globally
- Reading Progress challenges assignment has rolled out globally
3. Learning Accelerator updates
- Speaker Progress private preview has launched
- Math Progress private preview community
- Reflect updates
4. Reading Coach updates
5. Reflect updates
6. Teams for Education updates
- Teams Assignments LTI Preview is coming soon! Sign up if you are interested in joining the preview today.
7. Microsoft Forms updates
- Live sync data to Excel
- Embed Forms and callouts into Microsoft Stream
- Pre-fill form
Have any feedback to share with us? As always, we'd love to hear it!
We are always looking to improve the education experience in Teams, and our favorite way to do that is with your support and awesome ideas! If there is something you would like to see in Teams for Education, please let us know!
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