How are you using Ms Teams @ school?

[Marius Pretorius]

This is just a conversation starter to elicit some community of experts ideas.

Ms Teams for Education is still very young and evolving. Previously I've tried out Teams and have been using it successfully to some degree but this year (our academic year starts in January) I'm all in. Here are some of my ideas that work for me:

I've created a personal team which I use for my school admin and general planning. In the General channel I create a new "conversation" with an outline of my daily planning with the day as the heading/title. I also have an admin team for every subject that I teach where I keep all my preparation and assessments. There I create a new "conversation" with my lesson planning for that subject. I link items in the outline that I mentioned before, to the more specific subject planning for the day. That way I've got a kind of a dashboard that gives me holistic control over my day. I find this works really well. I can open my personal team on my phone which gives me the outline of the day, from there I can jump to any specific subject planning and I  can immediately see what is going on. This "makes my day"! 

[#2]

In case it was not clear - apart from all the other aspects of Teams, such as pinning documents to tabs, using Teams to collaborate etc, etc, - I am using Teams and the Posts space also for my personal daily planning.

I have a few personal teams: a general personal school admin team and an admin team for each subject I teach. I share the subject teams with teachers who are moderating my assessment tasks. I use the posts in the general channel of my school admin team for creating an outline of my day. I use the posts in the general channels of each subject admin team for a little more detailed planning on what I want to do in that subject for the day/lesson. All these posts are titled with the date. I link the points in my overall daily outline to my subject planning posts. That way I can easily jump them. In my class teams I also use the same approach: I create a post for each day/lesson where I give the learners instructions of what they have to do. All this can easily interact with all other aspects of Teams.

Another aspect of Teams/OneDrive/SharePoint which I use (I have explained this elsewhere) is the syncing of files. I sync the files of Teams to my computer and then I can access them from my File Explorer.

How are you using Teams as a teacher?

[#3]

>This is just a conversation starter to elicit some community of experts ideas. Nobody?

[#4]

@Marius Pretorius 

I am using Teams, OneNote (Class Notebook) and Sharepoint discussion board to organize content for two classes at Metropolitan State University of Denver. The Class Notebook has essentially replaced Powerpoint (lecture slides) and random Word documents for class notes. I wish the document editor in OneNote was better, but it works.

Teams is pretty good with a couple main limitations:

- Right now I'm looking to use our institution's Blackboard for the gradebook only because I can't figure out how to get Teams to show students their grades correctly. There's no student view (so I can see what they see) and I've seen straight up discrepancies between what I can see for a student and what they see. This sucks because of the time constraint of needing two platforms.

- The other major limitation is I'm using SharePoint for my discussion board, but there's no way to link that discussion board to Teams. Seems like there should be a custom tab available at the top of the channel to allow a hyper link to any desired address.

A couple thoughts.

[#5]

Thanks for the response, @Rich_Th . Does it not work if you add a website tab and enter the SharePoint hyperlink in that?