How to have parents join a Teams meeting for their disabled student when they do not have email

Copper Contributor

Hello. We have parents who do not have an email address, so we are unable to email them a join invitation to a MS Teams Meeting. Our school administration does not want to have to set up email addresses for parents and students. Is there a way to set up a standing Teams meeting so that parents can easily go to teams.microsoft.com for virtual learning?

 

We are a non profit that has a school that services students with intellectual disabilities and autism. For remote learning we have been using Zoom for education, but would now like to switch to MS Teams since we now have Microsoft 365 and Teams is included for no additional cost. Parents are used to going to the Zoom website and typing in a meeting code to access the remote learning meeting. 

 

Thank you for any insight or work arounds for this issue. 

 

 

2 Replies
Hello, well you can for example set up and allow "anonymous users can join a meeting" and you don't have to send the meeting link to an email address. You can copy the meeting link and send it in any other way that works (text message etc). The parents can then join and don't even have to have a Teams account.

I'm attaching a couple of links so you can discuss them with your IT.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/meeting-settings-in-teams#allow-anonymous-users-to-j...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-participant-settings-for-a-teams-meeting-53261366-...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-meeting-in-teams-1613bb53-f3fa-431e-85a9-d6a91e346...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-meeting-without-a-teams-account-c6efc38f-4e03-4e79...

@nonprofitschool @ChristianBergstrom's suggestion of sending the Teams meeting link using other communication methods is a good one. Another alternative that a number of our teachers use for younger students is to have parents login to Teams using the child's account. Teachers create a private channel for each student (note, there is a limit of 30 private channels per Team including deleted channels for 30 days) then put a post in the channel with the scheduled meeting time then use the Meet Now function in reply to the post in the private channel at the time of the meeting and parents are able to just join the meeting from the channel.  You could also create a recurring, standard meeting and invite the private channel using the email address of the channel. This will create a post in the private channel with the meeting details and a link to 'Join the meeting' that students can use to join the meeting.