Microsoft has announced Teams for Education December 2020 update with lots of new product features and improvements.
What’s New in Microsoft Teams for Education
1) See the latest features available in Teams, including Breakout Rooms
Virtual Breakout Rooms
As the meeting organizer, you can divide your online class into smaller groups to facilitate discussions, brainstorming, and more. A breakout room can be created in a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting, giving you greater flexibility depending on how you and your class meet. As the organizer you can easily jump in between breakout rooms, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. Any files from the breakout rooms can be shared in the main meeting and are available afterwards in the meeting chat.
If you’re looking for helpful resources to learn more and get started:
- Check out the main breakout rooms blog
- Get the breakout rooms quick start guide for educators (PDF)
- Watch the Tips from the Team breakout rooms video
- Visit the breakout rooms support page to learn more
New languages supported for real-time translation in live events
Translate Japanese, Korean, French, French-Canadian, Spanish, Spanish-Mexican, Traditional Chinese, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Hindi-Indian, Portuguese-Brazilian, and Russian into up to 50 different languages. Learn more
Check out all the latest features available in Teams here.
2) Apply policies with the Microsoft Teams for Education policy wizard, available now
With remote and hybrid learning on online platforms, it’s more important than ever to help keep your school community safe. With the new Microsoft Teams for Education policy wizard, available school IT admins can now easily apply education tailored policies for a safe learning environment.
The policy wizard allows the IT admin to quickly and easily apply the most relevant set of policies for students at a global (Org-wide default) level and apply a custom policy set to a group of educators and staff tailored to their needs. Learn more about the policy wizard here.
3) Allow school leaders, substitutes, and other approved individuals to join a class with the Classroom Drop-in app
Often times school leaders, substitute instructors, evaluators, TAs, and more individuals need to check in on or become a temporary teacher for a class. With the new Classroom Drop-in app template for Microsoft Teams, school leaders can set up “drop ins” to add a user to a Team without the need to bother IT or the instructor. The dropped in user can then check in on conversation, assignments, grades, class meetings and more!
IT administrators can set up and install the Classroom Drop-in app from GitHub and then make it available to leaders within their organization. Once installed and configured, leaders can begin setting up drop-ins right away.
To learn more, join us for a webinar on January 12 at 8am PST. Sign up at https://aka.ms/DropInWebinar
4) Join Public Preview to get early access to the latest Teams features
Microsoft Teams Public Preview is now available to help you and your school get early access to the latest Teams features. After an IT Admin enabled policy via a policy setting, individuals in the school can set your Teams client to switch on the public preview mode and try Together mode and Large Gallery (7×7) on the web and live reactions in Teams meetings. Watch how to join in this quick tip video.
5) Use Moodle and Teams together with the mConnect app
Now with the mConnect app by Skooler, you can bring all the richness of Moodle inside Teams to organize your courses and use Teams to learn and work together. The mConnect app allows you to:
- Have one workspace with access to Moodle courses, topics, assignments, and calendar in Teams
- Stay organized with collaborative Learning tabs in Teams channels
- Save time and be more in control with automated team and membership creation
Learn more about the mConnect app here.
