Monthly Archives: January 2021

Free Events For Schools Wanting To Achieve More With Microsoft Teams

Cloud Design Box and SalamanderSoft have partnered up to design and deliver three free webinars tailored to schools, academies and Multi Academy Trusts who are looking to make the most out of remote and blended learning with Microsoft Teams.

Throughout January and February, the training sessions are free to anyone who works at a school, college, academy or multi academy trust.

“We understand the pressure teachers have experienced during the last year, and with the new Covid-19 restrictions resulting in many schools juggling remote and in-classroom learning, it’s easy for them to feel overwhelmed and struggle to find the time to adapt lesson plans and materials,” says Tony Phillips, Founder of Cloud Design Box.

“Our sessions aim to show schools how to make the most of the digital tools available, avoid duplication of work, save time on admin and find more time to focus on their students.”

Below is an outline of each webinar:


Getting started with Microsoft Teams


Getting Started With Microsoft Teams – Thursday 28 January @ 10am

In this session, teachers can learn how best to use Teams to support home and blended learning with confidence, providing some actionable tips on how both staff and students can get started with Microsoft 365.


Planning Long Term User Adoption with Microsoft Teams


Planning Long Term User Adoption of Microsoft Teams in Schools and MATs – Thursday 28 January @ 3pm

When adopting any new technology, it’s crucial to bring everyone along on the journey with you – not just the tech-savvy members of staff.

Teams is no different. In this session, SalamanderSoft and the Cloud Design Box training team walk you through how to plan for long-term success with Teams, without leaving anyone behind.


Best Practices with Microsoft Teams


Best Practices with Microsoft Teams – Tuesday 2 February @ 10am

Specially-designed around overworked teachers who are struggling with Teams, this webinar demonstrates how you can eliminate additional work by collaborating on resources in a centralised location.

Department leaders learn how they can free up their staff’s time by using these tried-and-tested best practices.


Wilberforce College


Best Practices using Microsoft Teams with Wilberforce College – Wednesday 24 February @ 11am

Over the last year, Cloud Design Box has been working with schools and colleges across the country to support them with Covid-19 school closures and homeschooling through training and strategy sessions, as well as software set up and implementation.

One of these customers is Hull-based Wilberforce College:

“We realised that our students didn’t necessarily have access to lots of digital devices at home, and this was impacting on their ability to carry out independent work. We thought that by using one single platform where they could access all of their learning content on one app would be the best way forward. And that’s why we chose Teams and Cloud Design Box,” says Jonathan Butler, Assistant Principal (Teaching and Learning) at Wilberforce College.

“We’ve been looking for something like Teams for a long time and it’s changed the game for us during lockdown,” says Ashley Howe, STEM Faculty Head at Wilberforce College.

Wilberforce College using Microsoft Teams

Thanks to Cloud Design Box’s product and training, Wilberforce College has become the only educational institution in Hull and the East Riding to be awarded status as an EdTech DfE Demonstrator College.

“Without the help of Cloud Design Box, we would have never been in the position to achieve this,” says Jonathan Butler.

Cloud Design Box’s training sessions, up until now, have been primarily exclusive to existing customers. However, we are now opening up free places to anyone who works in a school and wants to develop their understanding of Microsoft Teams and how it can be used to deliver learning in and outside of the classroom.

Partner company SalamanderSoft supports Cloud Design Box’s product with its own technology and is looking forward to sharing their knowledge with teachers and school staff:

“It’s been a pleasure to work with Cloud Design Box over the past few years, and we’re very happy to be able to offer these sessions alongside them, to help schools get the most from Microsoft Teams as easily as possible,” says Jon Atkinson, Managing Director of SalamanderSoft.

To find out more about Cloud Design Box’s latest free and virtual events, please head to www.clouddesignbox.co.uk/events.

Getting Started with Rubrics in Microsoft Teams Assignments

Rubrics are a powerful tool used to assess students’ work. The criterion helps students to have a concrete understanding and visualisation of what they need to do to achieve a particular score. Each criterion also includes a gradation scale of quality.

Rubric in Teams

Microsoft Teams for education includes rubric based grading. They can be created and reused across Teams making it a powerful time saving tool for teachers while at the same time helping students understand how to succeed in the assignment.



When setting assignments there is a “Add Rubric” option on the “New assignment” form.

Add Rubric

On the choose a rubric form, you can search for a rubric that has already been created or create a brand new one. In this post I go through how to create a new one by selecting the “new rubric” option.

choose a rubric form

Give the new rubric a name and turn on “points” so that we can assign scores to each piece of criteria.

New Rubric form

Enter your criteria, you can add more lines by pressing the plus button. You can also adjust the grading balance for each element. Teams will turn the points into an overall percentage when marking based on the balance given to each criterion.

When you have finished creating your rubric, set the assignment for the students.

When the students have completed the assignment, go to review the work and open the student’s homework. In addition to the comment and grade, you can now select the rubric.

marking work

This will show the criteria and you can select which has been met. The student work will be automatically marked based on the grade balance set in the rubric.

marking with rubric

This is what the student will see when you have graded their work with the rubric.

Rubric for students pupils

It’s another fantastic update to Microsoft Teams for education. There is still more to come this summer including Microsoft Forms integration with self-marking quizzes. We will bring you news and guides on how to use that as soon as it is released!

Store Teams meeting recordings in SharePoint and OneDrive

Microsoft Teams meeting recordings are no longer in Microsoft Stream for many education licenses. This means it can be difficult to find or delete recordings at the current time.

Old meeting no longer stored in Stream

Microsoft are planning on moving all meeting recordings into OneDrive and SharePoint However, in the meantime recordings are stored in a temporary location (causing issues like deleting or keeping video files). This guide goes through how to enable SharePoint and OneDrive storage for Microsoft Teams meeting recordings early (switchover date for education tenants is 7th July 2021).



Where will new meeting records be stored?

Once enabled, any “Meet Now” recordings created in the Teams calendar will be saved into OneDrive of the person starting the meeting. Any recordings created in the Team channel (such as online lessons) will be stored in the files tab of the Team under a “Recordings” folder. More detailed examples can be found on the Microsoft site.

Recorded meetings folder

Configure OneDrive and SharePoint via PowerShell

Connect to Skype PowerShell using the code below.

Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession
Import-PSSession $sfbSession

If there are no policies applied to users, apply the setting to the “Global” policy.

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -RecordingStorageMode "OneDriveForBusiness"

To check if there are any policies applied to individuals, open the Teams admin centre, and locate a typical staff user. Click “View Policies” to locate the name of the Meeting policy applied to the user.
Teams admin centre center

Run the command again but this time for the custom policy. In this example, the policy is called “AllTeachersMeetingPolicy”.

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity AllTeachersMeetingPolicy -RecordingStorageMode "OneDriveForBusiness"

Sign out and then back in again (it may take a few hours to take effect)

Meeting recordings should now be stored inside OneDrive or SharePoint (Teams file tab).

Meeting recording stored in OneDrive or SharePoint in Teams
files tab storage

Add shortcut to OneDrive guide

SharePoint is a great place for a school or business to store shared resources. However, it can be difficult to keep track of all the different document locations. The new “Add shortcut to OneDrive” feature is a great way of keeping track of all the documents you use on a regular basis. Not only does it show the shared locations on the web, but it also maps to the OneDrive app for easy access on your windows 10 device.



Get started by finding your favourite SharePoint library.

SharePoint Library

Click the “Add shortcut to OneDrive” button. Simple!

How does it work?

Open OneDrive in the web. There is now a link to the SharePoint library (remember it is still shared and has not moved, it is just a link).
OneDrive on the web

It will have also synced to the desktop app so you can access all the SharePoint files as if it were a mapped drive on your local machine.

Desktop App

Any windows 10 device using this account will have the link to the SharePoint library, so you are ready to work anywhere on any device.

We found that this button saved so much time compared to syncing individual SharePoint libraries on each device we used.