All Class Teams provisioned by Microsoft School Data Sync are now deactivated for students. This means the students can only access the team once the teacher has pressed the activate button.
Monitored Conversations
One huge benefit is that students cannot have conversations in the team until it becomes activated. When hundreds of teams are created for each school every academic year, it’s hard to monitor all of them. With this new setting, teachers only have to monitor the conversations in teams that they have activated.
Prepare Class Teams in Advance
The activation step allows teachers to prepare content in the team before it goes live to students. Prepare your class notebook and assignments in advance before activating it at the start of term.
How to Activate the Team
It’s really simple, just click the “Activate” button shown below and confirm. Students will then have instant access to the team.
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Can you instead of clicking on the button use powershell to activate the team?
This is not possible as far as I’m aware.
It seems that it’s now possible to activate a class Team using the Graph API: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/team-update?view=graph-rest-beta&tabs=http
Thanks Robin, it sure is! Microsoft released this in August. However, if you are starting a new school year, it’s still worth letting teachers activate this themselves on each class so they can prep their classes before they are ready to use it. It will also keep students out of class teams that aren’t getting used by the teacher and causing mischief!
Is it still possible to activate the Team via Graph? I was looking at the v1 and Beta apis for get and update, and didnt find anything related to team activation, just team archive status.
Yes, information can be found here under early access https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/remote-learning-edu?tabs=early-access#early-access-to-class-teams
Can I activate a class through calendar/ join
Instead I going to general post activate
You should see the activate panel across the team on any tab in the General channel. It’s not possible to do this outside of Teams (as far as I’m aware). The idea is that you go into your team and prepare it. When you are ready for the students to come in, you click the activate button. Hope that helps.
It’s been over a year – is there a powershell script to find out if a class (or list of classes) have not yet been activated?
You can query the state with graph. You can also do a section report and it will list the activation state of all class teams.
Hi Tony,
What is the query that you would run using Graph Explorer to query the activation status of a team please?
Thank you!
Yes, information can be found here under early access: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/remote-learning-edu?tabs=early-access#early-access-to-class-teams