Lots of new and exciting features are coming to Microsoft Teams this summer, so get ready for the new academic year in advance and resolve any issues before the students are back.
I’m beginning the process of rolling over the academic year at many schools this month using Microsoft School Data Sync with the Cloud Design Box team. We have come across a few issues along the way. For the administrators out there trying to complete this process on their own, we thought it would be great to share our experience in the form of this video guide taking you through the process.
Before you begin the process, talk to SLT and teachers about the preferred clean-up options.
Expire All Classes
Adds a prefix to the start of the class name in this format: EXPMMYY. If you already prefix your classes with the academic year then there isn’t any reason to run this option.
Archive All Classes (recommended)
Archive makes the Team read-only. Teachers can restore a Team for a class and it will work as it did before. We recommend selecting this option so that teachers don’t have a long list of classes in the new academic year. If you have a course which lasts for two years, teachers can restore the class from the previous year and continue to use it; but it will no longer be updated with live MIS data.
Remove Students from All Classes
This removes students from class notebooks and all student data from assignments. This is non-reversible and therefore we do not recommend this choice.
A few issues to be aware of (which we cover in the video above):
- Some classes will fail to clean-up – you will have to do these manually.
- You may need to refresh the profile page if you get stuck on an error when starting the new term.
- Occasionally a clean-up process may get stuck processing forever. If it lasts longer than 24 hours, log a support call with the Microsoft Education team.
We hope this video helps you out. Please feel free to share your comments, wins and frustrations with the process in the comments below!
