AI-powered teaching and learning for all Microsoft 365 education customers
Welcome to our monthly update for Microsoft Education and thank you so much for being part of our growing community! In our main Microsoft Education blog this morning, we announced the details of how Microsoft Education is bringing even more value to all EDU customers with Microsoft 365, including a new set of capabilities designed for relevant and powerful use by educators and students. These features will be included in all of the academic SKUs (A SKUs) at no additional cost, and many will be rolling out starting today, while others will be rolling out later this year and into early next year. Topics: AI for educators at no additional cost AI for learners at no additional cost Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Microsoft 365 LTI (LMS integration updates) Microsoft 365 Copilot (add-on required) Learning Accelerator updates Learning Zone on the Copilot+ PC – public preview now available Minecraft EU updates We’re also introducing an academic offering for Microsoft 365 Copilot in education at $18 (USD) per user per month for educators, staff, and students ages 13 and older starting in December 2025. 1. AI for Educators at no additional cost Teach in the Microsoft 365 Copilot App We recently introduced the updated Microsoft 365 Copilot app, your hub for the latest AI functionality. Now, we are bringing AI-powered features to all educators with Teach in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. In one place, educators can easily create lesson plans, draft materials like quizzes and rubrics, and quickly make modifications like adjust reading levels, differentiate instructions, and align to relevant standards. As we continue to add more AI value in education, it will surface in the Teach module. Teach is your one stop shop for creating and adapting education content in a guided interface, designed for Education institutions. Teaching capabilities can assist you in drafting the best content for your class, including lesson plans, rubrics, learning activities and more! Guided: Create and adapt content in guided interfaces, reducing the need for advanced prompting techniques, while still giving you full control. Grounded: Leverage Education standards from 35 countries, your own content, and your class details to ground and create content relevant to your class. Available where you are: In the Microsoft 365 Copilot App on Web, Windows or Mac. When: Rolling out now with support for Lesson Plans, Rubrics, and Flashcards. Coming Soon: Support for Quizzes, Minecraft Lessons, Fill in the Blank activities, and modifying existing content. Learn more about Teach in the Microsoft 365 Copilot App here. Curriculum planning Curriculum planning tools in Teach empowers educators to design, organize, and adapt instructional materials with ease. By leveraging AI-powered tools, teachers can create lesson plans, activities, and assessments that align with educational standards and meet the diverse needs of their students. Whether starting from scratch or refining existing resources, curriculum planning provides a guided, flexible approach to support effective teaching and learning. Lesson plans with standard support Easily build standards-aligned lesson plans from a selection of over 35 countries. Educators can choose subject, grade level, language, relevant content and context, standards, and duration to tailor each lesson plan to their classroom needs. The platform enables ongoing editing and refinement—adjust the tone, length, or language, and receive further suggestions to ensure every lesson plan is effective and engaging. When: Lesson plans rolling out now Homework & Assessments Homework & Assessments tools in Teach help streamline homework and assessment creation for educators. With Rubrics and Quiz creation, teachers can easily build standards-aligned rubrics and quizzes, customize criteria and questions, and refine content to fit classroom needs. These tools support ongoing editing and suggestions, helping educators deliver clear, effective assessments that align with learning goals and standards. Rubrics with standards support Effortlessly create rubrics aligned to global standards from over 35 countries. Educators can select relevant criteria, customize performance levels, and ensure each rubric matches their subject, grade, and instructional goals. The platform supports ongoing editing—adjust the language, tone, or detail, and receive further suggestions to refine your rubric for clarity and effectiveness. Standards integration helps educators provide consistent, high-quality feedback and assessment for every student. When: Rubrics rolling out now Quiz creation with standards Create standards-aligned quizzes quickly with Quiz creation, powered by Forms. Start by selecting your subject, grade level, language, and relevant standards. Add a description, set the desired number of questions and quiz duration, and generate a draft. All editing and adjustments are done directly in Forms, where you can refine questions and further tailor the quiz to your students’ needs. When: Preview in November, 2025 Modify content Modify content tools are designed to help educators quickly adapt existing materials, rather than create new content from scratch. Whether you have resources from previous years, colleagues, or online sources, this feature streamlines the process of updating and customizing materials for your current needs. Align to standards Align to standards takes your input—whether it’s a lesson idea, instructions, or other classroom materials—and adapts the content to align with the standards you choose. This tool streamlines the process of meeting curriculum requirements by automatically tweaking your materials, ensuring they match the specific standards relevant to your subject and grade level. When: Preview in November, 2025 Modify reading level Quickly adjust the reading level of any text to meet the needs of individual students or your entire class. Simply insert your text or upload a file, then choose the desired reading level. You can also select key terms to preserve, ensuring important vocabulary remains unchanged while the rest of the content is adapted for accessibility and understanding. When: Preview in November, 2025 Differentiate instructions Differentiate instructions empowers educators to tailor learning experiences for diverse student needs. Easily adapt assignments, instructions, or activities to provide multiple pathways for understanding and engagement. Whether you’re supporting individual learners or groups, this tool helps you modify content, adjust complexity, and personalize directions—ensuring every student receives the right level of challenge and support. When: Preview in November, 2025 Expand with examples Enrich your materials by adding a chosen number of real world, historical, or scientific examples—tailored to support and clarify learning for every student. When: Preview in November, 2025 AI in Classwork and Class Notebook AI teaching tools are also coming to Classwork in Microsoft Teams and OneNote Class Notebook, providing easy ways to create content and share with students all in one place. Starting with lesson plans and flashcards in Teams today, and other features from Teach coming later to Teams and Class Notebook. When: Lesson plans and flashcards available now in Classwork and coming soon to OneNote Class Notebook. Suggested AI feedback for Educators Suggested AI feedback is a new feature that makes it easier for you when you want to provide feedback to students as part of your Assignments flow. Use the Feedback field as a scratchpad as you review the student work, and have AI help enhance and summarize it for you. Or, if you are using rubrics, you can have AI review your rubric selection and summarize it. This feature always uses your input as the basis of the suggested summarized feedback, and you will always need to confirm the suggested update and add potential edits, before returning to the student. When: Available now Set expected AI use in Assignments Set expected AI use in Assignments helps educators clearly communicate guidelines and recommendations for how students should use AI tools when completing assignments. Teachers can outline best practices and expectations, helping students understand appropriate and effective ways to leverage AI in their work. This feature encourages thoughtful, responsible use of AI to support learning. When: Preview Q1 2026 2. AI for learners at no additional cost Study and Learn Agent Bring the interactive, conversational Study and Learn Agent in the Microsoft 365 Copilot App to your students. Study and Learn helps learners understand concepts, practice skills with activities like flashcards, and prepare for tests with study guides and quizzes. Additional activities including fill-in-the-blanks, matching, and others that will continue to be added. Purpose-built for learning in collaboration with learning science experts, Study and Learn aims to help foster reflective and critical thinking. Over time, it will provide a more personalized, adaptive, inclusive experience to make learning relevant and bolster motivation. When: Preview fall 2025 Learning activities We’re excited to share that Learning Activities are now generally available for all educators and students 13+! Learning activities is a new Microsoft Education experience designed to help educators and students transform passive content into active learning. With just a few clicks, educators and students can now create engaging practice activities like flashcards directly from existing learning content. Our first learning activity will be AI generated flashcards in Teach and Classwork. We will also be launching a stand-alone web app for educators and students to create activities. We are hard at work building more learning activities that will be coming soon including fill-in-the-blanks, mind maps, and matching. When: Summer 2025 3. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Available for students 13+ Recently, we announced teen student availability coming this summer for Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot and now it is at general availability. To prepare, administrators should review guidance to enable Copilot Chat for students and ensure appropriate access: Enable Copilot Chat access for students Copilot Chat is included with Microsoft 365 at no additional cost and offers secure AI chat powered by GPT-5 with the ability to maintain IT control through enterprise data protection and management. It also includes features like file upload, image generation, Copilot Pages, and agents. Copilot Chat now in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote In addition, Microsoft recently announced that Copilot Chat is available in many of your favorite Office apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook. This is available today for all Microsoft 365 subscribers in Education. 4. Create with AI in Microsoft365 LTI® for Learning Management Systems A new, streamlined learning management system experience for Microsoft Education The new Microsoft 365 LTI brings Microsoft 365 for Education capabilities for learning management systems (like Canvas, PowerSchool Schoology, Blackboard, Moodle, D2L Brightspace) together into a single tool and streamlined user experience. Educators will be able to Create with AI, which makes features from Teach accessible in Learning Management Systems. This will include Lesson plans, Minecraft lessons, modifying content, rubric and instructions generation, suggested feedback, quiz creation, and more. Microsoft 365 LTI also provides seamless access to Learning Accelerators, Reflect, OneDrive, Teams, and our Microsoft 365 for Education tools directly into your LMS course, without having to deploy multiple tools, and without overcrowding the menus where LTI tools are accessed. Whether adding content to a course, creating an assignment, or scheduling an online meeting for a class, you can easily access Microsoft 365 directly in your LMS workflow. When: Create with AI – preview in early 2026 LTI® is a trademark of the 1EdTech® Consortium, Inc. (1edtech.org) 5. Microsoft 365 Copilot (add-on required) We’re excited to introduce an academic offering for Microsoft 365 Copilot in education at $18 (USD) per user per month for educators, staff, and students ages 13 and older starting in December 2025. Deeply integrated into apps used every day, Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of AI with your data – documents, presentations, emails, meetings, chats, institutional knowledge, and more – plus the web to deliver relevant responses with sources. It also delivers cutting-edge capabilities like comprehensive agent access including Researcher and Analyst, Copilot Tuning for increased customization, and the Copilot Control System to protect institutional data. Study guide in Copilot Notebooks Copilot Notebooks in Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI-powered workspace to stay focused on what matters most. Bring together Copilot chats, Microsoft 365 files, OneNote pages, meeting notes, and links—all in one place. Listen to an audio overview hosted by two voices. Ask questions and Copilot will analyze your notebook content, surface insights, and help you draft new content. Copilot Notebooks available now at microsoft365.com/copilot. (A Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required.) Coming to preview in Fall 2025, the new study guide feature will help learners turn scattered materials into an organized study space. Upload notes, lecture slides, handouts, and links to generate a custom guide with engaging activities, quizzes, and topic deep dives. Summary and topic pages include explanations, worked examples, and questions that help learners understand, think and apply their learning. With flashcards, quizes, and fill-in-the-blanks, learning becomes active and personalized – for college, K-12, and adults learners alike. Copilot Notebooks are available inside OneNote alongside all the rest of your classic Notebooks to keep everything together and easy to find. When: Copilot Notebooks available now, Study Guide preview November 2025 6. Learning Accelerator updates AI Transcript Feedback in Speaker Progress is now GA! We are excited to share our new narrative AI feedback feature in Speaker Progress is now fully rolled out to all users! We are bringing generative AI to Speaker Progress to give students robust feedback on their speeches. Educators can choose to enable AI feedback, select a speech type, and evaluation criteria. Student speeches will then receive summary feedback and in line comments to help them improve the content and qualitative aspects of their presentations. The educator is fully in control and must review AI Feedback before it is shared with students. When: Available Now! 7. Microsoft Learning Zone enters public preview Earlier this year, we introduced Microsoft Learning Zone, a new app built for Copilot+ PCs to help educators create interactive, personalized lessons in minutes. Now available in public preview, the app combines research-informed tools and trusted on-device AI to help educators save time, engage students, and keep content and data secure. We are grateful to the educators, researchers, and partners who have helped shape the experience so far. In the months ahead, we will continue to expand Learning Zone with new features, rich content partnerships, and deeper integration into classroom workflows. When: Learning Zone is now in public preview. If your school is planning to explore Learning Zone, please note that an IT administrator must enable the app before it can be used. View instructions here. 8. Minecraft Education’s AI Foundations curriculum Crack the case of AI misuse as a rookie detective Join Detective Reed Smart to investigate curious cases of AI misuse in this mystery from Minecraft Education! Analyze deepfakes, spot AI-generated content, and learn how AI works as you follow clues and analyze evidence across three cases. Build AI and information literacy skills that will help you get wise and stay cautious of online information. Ready to crack the case? Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/_JuQXY6UZ2Q?si=fvHbLiX3nLcOE5mA Join this hands-on training designed to empower educators to teach AI literacy using Minecraft Education’s AI Foundations curriculum and Microsoft Copilot. Through interactive demos and ready-to-use resources, you’ll explore how to make AI concepts engaging and accessible for students—no prior experience with AI or Minecraft required! Minecraft Education Crack the case of AI misuse as a rookie detective ________ 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: AI for educators at no additional cost Teach in the Microsoft 365 Copilot App Classwork integration AI Feedback Standards integration Learning Activities AI for learners at no additional cost Study and Learn Agent Learning Activities Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Now available for teens (13+) Now available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote Microsoft 365 LTI (LMS integration updates) Create with AI Microsoft 365 Copilot (add-on required) Study guide in Copilot Notebooks Learning Accelerator updates Speaker Progress Narrative AI feedback Learning Zone on the Copilot+ PC – public preview now available Minecraft Education's AI Fundations Curriculum Mike Tholfsen Group Product Manager Microsoft EducationCalling all IT Admins - webinar on configuring Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and new updates for 13+
Calling all IT admins — join us for a workshop where we’ll walk through how to configure Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, from your tenant all the way to the end-user experience. We’ll cover the latest features now available — including the new 13+ student configuration options, CSV, SDS and Powershell uploads, Copilot agents & extensibility, and updated licensing & security controls. By the end, you’ll be able to confidently deploy, manage, and optimize Copilot Chat in your environment so your users can safely harness AI productivity from day one. This webinar will be led by Bill Sluss and Jethro Seghers, Principal Product Managers from the Microsoft Education team When: Wednesday, October 29th @ 8am Pacific Time Register: https://msit.events.teams.microsoft.com/event/7b0cfbc2-e169-461b-9ea2-48effc009d4c@72f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47Step-by-Step: Setting Up GitHub Student and GitHub Copilot as an Authenticated Student Developer
To become an authenticated GitHub Student Developer, follow these steps: create a GitHub account, verify student status through a school email or contact GitHub support, sign up for the student developer pack, connect to Copilot and activate the GitHub Student Developer Pack benefits. The GitHub Student Developer Pack offers 100s of free software offers and other benefits such as Azure credit, Codespaces, a student gallery, campus experts program, and a learning lab. Copilot provides autocomplete-style suggestions from AI as you code. Visual Studio Marketplace also offers GitHub Copilot Labs, a companion extension with experimental features, and GitHub Copilot for autocomplete-style suggestions. Setting up your GitHub Student and GitHub Copilot as an authenticated Github Student Developer
What's New in Microsoft EDU - October 2025 (AI for all edition)
Join us on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 for our latest "What's New in Microsoft EDU" webinar! This will be a special one where we go into depth about all of the AI powered tools for educators and students who use Microsoft 365 in Education that we just announced. These 30-minute webinars are put on by the Microsoft Education Product Management group and happen once per month, this month both 8:00am Pacific Time and 4:00pm Pacific time to cover as many global time zones as possible around the world. And don’t worry – we’ll be recording these and posting on our Microsoft Education YouTube channel in the new “What’s New in Microsoft EDU” playlist, so you’ll always to able to watch later or share with others! Here is our October 2025 webinar agenda: M365 Copilot and AI updates for Educators and Students Learning Zone public preview and the Copilot+ PC Microsoft 365 LTI for Learning Management Systems AMA - Ask Microsoft EDU Anything (Q&A) We look forward to having you attend the event! How to sign up OPTION 1: October 22nd, Wednesday @ 8:00am Pacific Time Register here OPTION 2: October 22nd, Wednesday @ 4:00pm Pacific Time Register here This is what the webinar portal will look like when you register: We look forward to seeing you there! Mike Tholfsen Group Product Manager Microsoft EducationBookings calendar not displaying availability
We have a personal bookings page set up with 4 meeting types, two public and two private. None are displaying any availability, except ONE of the private ones, despite checking custom settings and ensuring there are no availability clashes or all-day events in the calendar. The one private booking type that is showing appropriate availability has both custom hours and a date-bound limit (only booking until November 6). So the broken ones look like the Devised Theatre appointments above. And the only one that is working is the ANTH 100 below: Both of the above screenshots are pulling from the same calendar and availability. We were able to get the Devised Theatre one to display some availability by setting it to a custom limited date range and custom hours, then reverting it back to standard availability and no date range which seemed to preserve the availability the system found when limited, but provides no availability beyond those previously set custom hours despite having no more set limitations. Do we have to fiddle with custom availability to "unlock" standard availability? Or is there an actual fix that would resolve this issue?
