Microsoft has announced a number of new Microsoft Teams features.
These features include an expanded audience view of up to 49 participants, custom backgrounds, class insights, and virtual breakout rooms etc.
All the new experiences are mostly aimed towards helping and supporting educators, faculty, and students preparing to use remote methods of learning, participation in the upcoming school year.
According to our community of educators, over half said “keeping students engaged digitally” and “student participation” are the top challenges they faced during remote learning.
Microsoft
- For educators, seeing all their students’ faces at the same time makes a big difference in student engagement, as well as social and emotional connection. That’s why, coming to preview this month with general availability in the fall, we are expanding the Teams grid view to 7×7, which will accommodate up to 49 participants at once on a single screen. In the fall, educators will be able to create virtual Breakout Rooms so students can meet and collaborate in small groups.
- Educators also need more options to ensure every student can participate and that every voice is heard. In Teams for Education, students can Raise Their Hands during class meetings. Educators can also see Attendance Reports and view Class Insights, an intelligent data analytics breakdown showing how students engage with the class, including assignments turned in, activity metrics and grades, with a new trends view coming in time for fall.
- For educators, maintaining student security and control over the classroom experience is critical. This summer, we are adding new meeting options in Teams that prevent students from starting meetings unattended, let educators determine who can present in a meeting, and give educators the ability to create a Meeting Lobby to ensure only assigned students can join a meeting—adding to Microsoft’s approach to privacy and security, which supports more than 90 regulatory and industry standards, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for the security of students and children.
More information can be found here on this page.
