Monthly Archives: March 2020

Teacher Guide to Presenting Remote Lessons using Microsoft Teams

In this video and guide we show you the best way to start an online lesson in Microsoft Teams. Follow the tips below if you want to control presenters and have more control over the video conference.





Tip 1 – Schedule your lesson

Scheduling your lesson in the calendar rather than starting a meeting on the fly gives you a number of benefits including:

  • Sends out an email invitation to all students
  • If students accept the invitation it will add it to their own personal outlook calendar providing structure to their day.
  • You can stop students from being presenters (and some of the disruption they could cause)

When creating the calendar invite, there is no need to add the students individually, you just need to select the class as shown below.

Schedule Lesson

Tip 2 – Stop students presenting

By default, students are also presenters which means they can share their screens and kick others out of the meeting. This may disrupt the lesson, but you can change this setting!

Save the calendar meeting and wait for it to finish setting up (it becomes bold in the calendar view).

lesson entry

Once you go back into the calendar item, you will see there are additional menu items for controlling the meeting options.

Meeting options

Select “Meeting options” and then change the presenter to “Only Me” and press “Save”.

Presenter options

Tip 3 – Mute microphones

The first 4 students who join the meeting will have their mics unmuted, use the “Mute all” button at any point during the lesson.

Mute all

Tip 4 – Share screens

Use the share button to share your screen or present an application or file.

Share screen

Tip 5 – Mention that the lesson is about to start

Mentioning the class will send them an instant notification in teams. Use it to notify them that the lesson is about to start.

Mention

Tip 6 – Record the lesson

Some students may not be able to make it to your lesson in time. Ensure no one misses out and that they can use it for revision purposes by recording the meeting.

record lesson meeting

We hope you find these tips useful. Good luck with your online lessons!

Student and Parent Guide to Microsoft Teams

We have made a quick video guide for students and parents about using Microsoft Teams from home during this time of remote learning. We hope you find it useful!



Useful PowerShell Scripts for Managing Classes in Microsoft Teams

So, you have school data sync setup and all of your class teams have been generated in Microsoft Teams. Teachers are eager to start using it for extending the classroom or remote learning. Teachers then realise that students can do things that they were not aware of and request for some rights to be restricted.

Here is a list of useful PowerShell scripts to help you manage some of the most common issues that schools face.

  • – Allow teachers to delete student messages
  • – Stop students emailing the class group
  • – Disable chat for students
  • – Calling and Live Event Policies

Allow teachers to delete student messages

It’s surprising that this is not enabled as standard. Owners in class teams cannot delete member messages unless a custom message policy is set.

Create a messaging policy in the Teams Admin centre

Create a new messaging policy and select “Owners can delete sent messages”

Create custom message policy in Teams
Owners can delete messages
Apply Custom Message Policy using PowerShell
 

This needs to be run as a global admin. The variables at the top of the script should be changed to the AAD (or synced AD) group that you want to apply the messaging policy to and the message policy name. 

#Variables to change - add the AAD group and custom message policy name here
$ADSecurityGroupNameToApplyPolicyTo="All Teachers"
$customMessagePolicyName="CustomTeacherMessagingPolicy1"

# Install AzureAD PowerShell if you don't already have it - commented out below
# install-module azuread

#Import modules if you haven't already
Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
Import-Module AzureAD

#Connect to Skype and Azure AD
$userCredential = Get-Credential
$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $userCredential
Import-PSSession $sfbSession
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $userCredential

$GroupUsers = Get-AzureADGroup -ALL $true -Filter "DisplayName eq '$ADSecurityGroupNameToApplyPolicyTo'" | Get-AzureADGroupMember -ALL $true | select mail
 
foreach ($GroupUser in $GroupUsers)
{
	$userEmail=$GroupUser.Mail
	write-host "Processing $userEmail"
	Grant-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy -PolicyName "$customMessagePolicyName" -Identity "$userEmail"
}

Stop students emailing the class group

Once a student receives a welcome message into a group, they may reply back to it or find it in the address list and start a large group email.

In the script below connect to Microsoft Exchange PowerShell. You should update the variables with an AD security group for students to apply the policy to. To ensure you only apply this to the relevant teams, use the wildcard search to filter them. In this example we are assuming teams have been named in a format of SchoolCode-AcademicYear-ClassName so we can set the wildcard to only apply this setting to Teams starting with SCH-2019. 

######Replace the following variables if necessary##########
$studentADSecurityGroup ="All Students"   #AD Group for all students
$wildcardsearch="SCH-2019*"                #Wildcard for Teams display name - Search for Teams beginning with ....  
###########################################################

$MyCredential = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $MyCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session -AllowClobber
$groups = Get-UnifiedGroup -ResultSize 20000 -SortBy DisplayName -Identity "$wildcardsearch" | Select DisplayName,WhenCreated,Id
 
foreach ($group in $groups)
{
    $teamName = $group.DisplayName
    Write-Host "restricting group emails on $teamName for $studentADSecurityGroup"
    Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "$teamName" -RejectMessagesFromSendersOrMembers "$studentADSecurityGroup"
}

Disable chat for students

Teams is a safe environment for students to chat, chats can be audited and monitored more closely than if they where to use WhatsApp or snapchat outside of the school systems. However, there are some situations where it might require turning off for safeguarding reasons.

Create message policy in Teams admin centre
Teams message policy

Click “Add” to create a new message policy and turn off the chat setting.

Turn off chat for students


Apply Custom Message Policy using PowerShell

This needs to be run as a global admin. The variables at the top of the script should be changed to the AAD (or synced AD) group that you want to apply the messaging policy to and the message policy name. 

#Variables to change - add the AAD group and custom message policy name here
$ADSecurityGroupNameToApplyPolicyTo="All Students"
$customMessagePolicyName="CustomStudentMessagingPolicy1"

# Install AzureAD PowerShell if you don't already have it - commented out below
# install-module azuread

#Import modules if you haven't already
Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
Import-Module AzureAD

#Connect to Skype and Azure AD
$userCredential = Get-Credential
$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $userCredential
Import-PSSession $sfbSession
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $userCredential

$GroupUsers = Get-AzureADGroup -ALL $true -Filter "DisplayName eq '$ADSecurityGroupNameToApplyPolicyTo'" | Get-AzureADGroupMember -ALL $true | select mail
 
foreach ($GroupUser in $GroupUsers)
{
	$userEmail=$GroupUser.Mail
	write-host "Processing $userEmail"
	Grant-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy -PolicyName "$customMessagePolicyName" -Identity "$userEmail"
}

Calling Policies

Calling policies can be used to configure what can and can’t be done by users when calling on Teams. An example of this might be for preventing students from calling on Teams.

Calling policies can be found under Voice as shown below:

Calling Policies

These are the settings that can be applied:

Teams Calling Policy for Students

This is how we apply a calling policy:

#Variables to change - add the AAD group and custom message policy name here
$ADSecurityGroupNameToApplyPolicyTo="All Students"
$customMessagePolicyName="CallingPolicyForStudents"

# Install AzureAD PowerShell if you don't already have it - commented out below
# install-module azuread

#Import modules if you haven't already
Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
Import-Module AzureAD

#Connect to Skype and Azure AD
$userCredential = Get-Credential
$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $userCredential
Import-PSSession $sfbSession
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $userCredential

$GroupUsers = Get-AzureADGroup -ALL $true -Filter "DisplayName eq '$ADSecurityGroupNameToApplyPolicyTo'" | Get-AzureADGroupMember -ALL $true | select mail
 
foreach ($GroupUser in $GroupUsers)
{
	$userEmail=$GroupUser.Mail
	write-host "Processing $userEmail"
	Grant-CsTeamsCallingPolicy -Identity "$userEmail" -PolicyName "$customMessagePolicyName"
}

Live Event Policies

Live Event policies might be used restricting who can attend or record them live events.

Live event policies can be found under Meetings as shown below:

Live Event Policies

These are the options when setting up a Live Events policy.

Teams Live Event Policy for Teachers

This is how we apply a Live Event policy:

#Variables to change - add the AAD group and custom message policy name here
$ADSecurityGroupNameToApplyPolicyTo="All Students"
$customMessagePolicyName="LiveEventPolicyForStudents"

# Install AzureAD PowerShell if you don't already have it - commented out below
# install-module azuread

#Import modules if you haven't already
Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
Import-Module AzureAD

#Connect to Skype and Azure AD
$userCredential = Get-Credential
$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $userCredential
Import-PSSession $sfbSession
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $userCredential

$GroupUsers = Get-AzureADGroup -ALL $true -Filter "DisplayName eq '$ADSecurityGroupNameToApplyPolicyTo'" | Get-AzureADGroupMember -ALL $true | select mail
 
foreach ($GroupUser in $GroupUsers)
{
	$userEmail=$GroupUser.Mail
	write-host "Processing $userEmail"
	Grant-CsTeamsMeetingBroadcastPolicy -Identity "$userEmail" -PolicyName "$customMessagePolicyName"
}

Update 11/11/2020: We have been informed that you may need to connect to Teams PowerShell to run these commands rather than Skype on some tenants (Connect-MicrosoftTeams).

Setting up Microsoft Class Teams quickly with SDS to prepare for coronavirus school closures

This is a quick update from Cloud Design Box. Due to the current situation of social distancing being implemented across the world, we have had a lot of schools rushing to setup Microsoft Teams.

There are a number of ways you can setup Microsoft School Data Sync to create Class Teams from your MIS/SIS data:

We have recently recorded a podcast on how you might use Class Teams for remote learning, you can watch it here.



Our products are designed to be curriculum lead to support your long term digital strategy to move to the cloud. However, we recognise that schools need a quick interim solution to prepare them for remote learning which is why we are now supplying a more lightweight solution to get you onboarded quickly with the option to look at the bigger picture when things have settled down. Please contact us for more information via the contact page on our website.


Cloud Design Box