20 updates for Microsoft Teams for Education, including 7x7 video and Breakout Rooms
Over the last few months, schools and institutions have been working tirelessly to enable distance learning. We’ve heard directly from many of you about engaging students in lessons, encouraging student-to-student collaboration, and facilitating staff professional development, all while remote. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas about how to improve Microsoft Teams for distance and hybrid learning. We continue to be inspired by you and are always exploring and implementing new ways for Teams to support student engagement and professional development.
Five Essential Tips on Auto-grading for Microsoft Forms Quizzes
We have been delighted to hear that educators around the globe are using Microsoft Forms to create surveys and quizzes for their students’ learning. Whether it is your first time adding branching to create personalized formative assessments or you have been adding quizzes as Teams assignments for a long time, we want to share some best practices on how to use the auto-grading feature in your Forms quizzes.
Introducing Simpler Sign-on: a way to sign in to Office 365 with your Google account
A new step in bringing Microsoft tools to Google schools We’re excited to announce Customer Preview of simpler sign-on from G Suite to Office 365! Many G Suite for Education customers have told us that they’d like to use Office 365, but their students have trouble remembering two sets of passwords. With this new solution, they won’t have to, because they can just sign in to Office 365 using their Google credentials, and work side by side in Google Classroom and their Office apps! We’re at the beginning of an exciting new journey to bring Office 365 to Google school districts. We’re starting by rolling out support in the United States for two of our most popular Education experiences – OneNote and Immersive Reader. These will run on Chromebooks in certain tech configurations. OneNote is a digital binder that makes it easier to store and share all your class materials, and Immersive Reader in OneNote is a powerful feature that’s proven to help students with reading differences improve their skills and comprehension. If you’re a G Suite for Education user, we hope these tools can help you achieve better student outcomes in your district. And we need your help. Please sign up to join the waitlist, and tell your IT admin to sign up too. Then try us out and let us know what you think. How it works We know that every minute of classroom instruction is precious, and we’ve heard that your students lose precious minutes trying to sign in to apps and devices. So, we've built a new solution that we affectionally call "simpler sign-on", featuring a tailor-made version of our popular Office Online extension for the Chrome browser. With simpler sign-on, once you sign in to your school’s Chromebook, you can be automatically signed in to Office 365 in just two clicks, without retyping a username or password. And there’s no need for you or your students to do any special configuration, because your IT admin can set it all up for you. We’ll even help them get going for free! Store and share class materials with OneNote and Class Notebooks Google Classroom is popular with teachers, and we’re here to make it even better with OneNote Online, our powerful digital notebook. With OneNote Online, your students can enjoy freeform notes and class materials that include text, photos, audio, links, embedded content, and more. OneNote Online even has an easy-to-use equation editor, equation solver, and graphing calculator. To learn the basics of OneNote Online, visit this support page. OneNote Class Notebooks raise the bar even higher with a Content Library for handouts, a personal workspace for every student, and a Collaboration Space for lessons and creative activities. They’re a great way to store a whole “binder” of class materials all in one place, especially when you link to them from Google Classroom. There are also pre-built Class Notebooks that deliver content, such as: Code.org Notebook Open Up Resources Math Open Up Resources English Language Arts Mystery Skype Class Notebook To save time, you can connect a OneNote Class Notebook directly to your Google Classroom and import your Classroom course roster. You’ll be able to create and distribute assignments in OneNote and push the grades back to Classroom, so you can view all your assignments and grades in one place. To watch a quick interactive video on how to use a OneNote Class Notebook, check out this short, interactive course on the Microsoft Educator Community. Improve reading comprehension With Microsoft Immersive Reader, you can empower students to independently improve their reading and writing skills. Immersive Reader is a free tool that offers text and math decoding solutions for students with learning differences such as dyslexia and dysgraphia. Its features include Read Aloud, Picture Dictionary, Line focus, breaking words into syllables, and color-coded parts of speech. Immersive Reader also increases fluency for English language learners or readers of other languages with real-time translation, and because it’s built into OneNote Online, it works great on Chromebooks. If you store your course materials as OneNote pages, you can empower your students with learning differences to read texts in the way that best supports their learning. Interested in trying simpler sign-on? We can’t wait for you to try our tools, and we look forward to your feedback so we can learn where to improve. Please sign up to join the waitlist at https://aka.ms/OfficeEduForYou and tell your IT admin to sign up, too. We’ll provide them with free guidance to help them evaluate if simpler sign-on is a good fit for your district. And if it is, we’ll help them set it up, for free!Microsoft Teams meetings for the classroom – what to use now, and what is coming soon
Over the last few weeks, schools have been working tirelessly to enable distance learning for their students and faculty. We’ve heard directly from many of you about engaging students in lessons, encouraging student to student collaboration, and facilitating staff professional development all while remote and we are inspired. We encourage you to explore the many ways you can use Teams meetings today for online classes, as well as let you know what is coming soon.
Reading Progress in Microsoft Teams to improve student reading fluency - now rolled out globally!
Reading Progress is a free tool designed to support educators in creating personalized reading experiences that build confidence and reading fluency in their students. Starting today, Reading Progress is beginning global rollout! Expect about two weeks for this tool to be available everywhere.
