Tag Archives: Class Teams

How to use Presenter Mode in a Microsoft Teams Meeting

Using Presenter Mode in a Microsoft Class Teams meeting gives teachers more control over their lesson. They have access to their presenter notes and all the usual Class Teams tools, plus additional presenter options.

Presenter Mode is only available in the desktop application of Teams.

In this quick guide, we show you how to use Presenter Mode and get the most out of it for your next lesson.

Setting up Presenter Mode in Microsoft Teams.

Once the Teams meeting has started, select Share Content on the navigation bar.

This opens up a menu where you can choose to share your entire desktop, specific windows, Microsoft Whiteboard or PowerPoint.

Select Browse on the right-hand side to either Upload from my computer or OneDrive depending on where your PowerPoint is located.

Once you select your PowerPoint, it opens up into the Class Teams meeting.

Presenter tools in Class Teams.

The full range of meeting tools, such as View Participants, Meeting Chat and the More Actions menu (…) are visible and you’re able to easily scroll back and forth between slides.

There are also some additional options beneath your slide deck, including Go to slide, which allows you to bring up a grid of your slide deck and choose a specific slide you wish to present.

Meanwhile, under More actions (…), you can hide the presenter view from yourself so you don’t see your notes, just the slides.

A further option is to View slides in high contrast. Toggle this on to only view the images and text on your slides and remove any extra design elements or backgrounds. This won’t change the view for students, only teachers.

What do students see when teachers are using Presenter Mode?

Students can scroll through the slide deck using the private viewing bar and then select Back to presenter to go back to the slide the teacher is currently on.

This feature can be switched off by teachers by clicking the Eye icon. When disabled, a line appears across the Eye icon and students are unable to scroll through the slides while you’re teaching.

Playing video clips in Presenter Mode.

There are two ways of showing video clips when in Presenter Mode:

One option is to embed a video into your presentation. This can be viewed by selecting the play button, which plays the video within the presentation.

Note: This only works if students have the latest version of PowerPoint installed on their device.

Secondly, you could include a video link. Clicking a link opens the video on a separate window.

To show the video to your students within the lesson, you need to go back to the Share content button and select the window the video has opened in.

If you’re using a two-screen setup, it will open on your other screen and in the same way, select Screen #1 or Screen #2, depending on which screen it has opened in.

Note: You also need to toggle on Include computer sound for your students to hear the video.

Watch a step-by-step guide on how to use presenter mode in class teams:

If you would like to learn more about how we can help your school, please contact a member of our team today.

How To Turn Off The Chat Feature in Class Teams

The chat feature in Microsoft Teams is a useful tool that allows students to communicate with their teachers and peers during online lessons. However, there may be times where the chat feature isn’t necessary and is causing distractions during lesson time.

Similar to the mute feature on Teams, this can easily be controlled and turned off, enabling you to teach without any interruptions.

There are two simple ways to turn off the chat function, this can be done before or during your online lesson:

Disable chat function in Class Teams before your lesson.

You can disable the chat function before your lesson starts through Meeting options. This can be accessed on the calendar entry for your meeting.

Meeting options is found under Details on the calendar entry.

When the Meeting options menu appears, you can disable the meeting chat, along with other options for your meeting, such as who can present and allowing your students to un-mute themselves.

To turn off the chat feature, change the Allow meeting chat option from enabled to disabled. Make sure to click Save after – this disables the chat function and activates any other changes you’ve made.

Your students are made aware that the chat function isn’t available in the chat window when the lesson starts.

Disable chat function in Class Teams during your lesson.

Teachers can also disable the chat function during the lesson. This can be useful when you want to disable the chat during certain parts of your lesson.

At the top of your screen, there are a few options that allow you to control your meeting. To disable the chat function, you need to select the more actions menu (…).

When the drop-down menu appears, select Meeting options.

Enable chat function in Class Teams during your lesson.

At some point during your lesson, you may want to turn on the chat function to allow your students to communicate again. This can be done the same way by selecting Meeting options and enabling Allow meeting chat.

Using Meeting options is a great way to control your lessons and prevent any distractions during lesson time. The simplicity of this process also allows you to quickly change these options during your lessons giving you the freedom to activate and deactivate at any time and allowing students to contribute and communicate at the right times to enhance their learning.

Watch our step-by-step video on how to turn off the chat feature in Class Teams:

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!

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:

– Get free help from Microsoft to manually setup School Data Sync
– Try setting it up yourself following this guide
– Try our new lightweight solution to setup SDS
– Use another paid or free third party solution such as SalamanderSoft

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.

Class Teams Activation

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.

If you need help automating Microsoft Teams from MIS data and getting good user adoption in the classroom, contact us at Cloud Design Box.

Office 365 User Adoption Podcast Episode 7 – Unlock Classroom Collaboration Potential with Files in Teams and SharePoint

Conversations and instant messaging are only one part of Microsoft Class Teams. Its true power shines through when teachers share their resources with their classes through the File Sharing tabs and SharePoint integration.

Students can immediately access files and resources that their teachers upload and continue learning outside of the classroom.

However, many teachers spend hours uploading and moving files in specific Class Teams. Sound familiar?

Luckily, there’s a much more effective way of managing class resources in Office 365.

Instead of storing your main resources in separate Class Teams, we recommend making use of SharePoint by having a central hub for all of your long-term resources – i.e. the ones your pupils will need over and over again, right the way through the school year.

Not only is this faster for you to manage, but by creating a central SharePoint resource library for each subject, you remove the need to duplicate work while allowing teachers and heads of departments to collaborate when creating valuable learning resources.

“Resources quickly become siloed if you only upload them to individual classes,” Darren Hemming, our Teaching and Learning Consultant says.

Darren is a former teacher of Modern Languages and ICT and is a passionate advocate of blended learning. He has also worked with schools, leading several large-scale learning platform projects for local authorities and for Building Schools for the Future.

“I’ve seen the collaboration and sharing of resources work very well across departments, and even across different schools inside of one multi-academy trust.”

Once this central hub is set up, you no longer have to worry about attaching individual files and folders to individuals Class Teams.

Simply select + to add a tab and then add your SharePoint resource library to the Class Team.

Now, we’re not telling you to avoid sharing anything directly in Class Teams.

Of course, if you have a one-off resource to share with your class on a specific topic, sharing only in Teams instead of SharePoint first makes a lot of sense.

However, creating a central library for your main resources and then adding them to Teams is a much faster, straightforward way of file sharing with your classes.

Office 365 User Adoption Podcast Episode 1 – Thomas Deacon Education Trust

Smooth, frictionless user adoption can be tricky.

You’ve decided that Office 365 and SharePoint is right for you. But, there’s the small matter of convincing the rest of your team and getting everyone in your organisation on board.

We’re creating a series of podcasts focusing on real-life user adoption stories, with schools, academies and businesses just like yours.

Our aim is to share and encourage a community resource that will help others who may be struggling with user adoption.

The first episode of this podcast features Tony Phillips, Cloud Design Box Founder, Darren Hemming, our Operations Manager, and Martin Byford-Rew who is the Head of ICT Services at Thomas Deacon Education Trust.

Martin outlines the key challenges he faced when starting to move across to Office 365 and SharePoint, as well as giving some excellent actionable tips on how to roll out the suite across a school, academy or business.

“Our overall vision has been the same throughout the whole process – to move over to the cloud and get everyone to see the value in Office 365 and SharePoint,” Martin tells us.

“However, achieving this has been challenging and we’re still not 100% of the way there. I hope that my experience will help others avoid some of the pitfalls we have fallen down.”

Based in the East Midlands, Thomas Deacon Education Trust is a small but growing organisation with five schools and around 4,000 students. With experience using an on-premise SharePoint solution for several years in one of these schools, Martin has now begun gradually moving everyone over to the cloud. Here’s how he is achieving this:

1. Start at the top.

“We started user adoption from the very top – the board. This involved a very short, concise training session with board members to show them the basic building blocks of Office 365 and SharePoint,” Martin explains.

From there, the ICT team worked their way down the school structure, introducing the technology to each level of the school.

2. Take small, simple steps.

“It’s all about small, quick wins. Teach the ‘ABC’ steps of Office 365 and what you can do with it, instead of overwhelming people with the vast number of features that may not even be useful for them,” he continues.

Martin accomplished this by organising short, 10-minute sessions where he encouraged staff to log in, create and save a file and then share it with a colleague.

“When people see that they can create a document and not physically press save to save a file to OneDrive, they are willing to learn more. Everyone has a memory of the time when they forgot to press save on a document they’ve been working on.”

3. Know your audience.

“There’s no point in presenting a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Get to know how your staff work, get to know what their pain points are and offer a resolution from there,” Martin highlights.

“No matter how much training you give someone, if they don’t need to use a feature, they won’t use it.”

By tailoring your training to individuals or small groups of people with a similar job role, you can really get them to understand how the product can help them save time.

Finally, Martin gives some real-life examples of where he has rolled out Office 365 and SharePoint.

1. Parents evening feedback.

Previously, parents would fill out a paper slip, which would then have to be processed and sorted by admin staff. It was a slow process and many parents would forget to complete the forms.

Now, teachers approach parents with an iPad that has four or five questions on. It’s instant feedback and doesn’t require as much time from the admin team.

2. Friday quizzes.

A similar example of how Office 365 and SharePoint has transformed pupils’ learning experiences is with end-of-the-week quizzes.

Again, this was once a paper-based exercise that was time-consuming and unengaging.

Students now answer questions on an iPad or other device and can see their results straight away, as well as compare their progress to their fellow classmates. It gives them an opportunity to take control of their own learning, as well as providing the teacher with insight into how well their class understood the lesson.

Final, takeaway points from Martin on user adoption:

Keep training short and concise.
Leadership first and work down.
Start simple.
Solve problems.
Tailor for audience.
Transformation takes time.

Setting Assignments in Microsoft Teams for Education

Homework has many benefits for students including learning how to work independently, staying organised and taking responsibility for their part in the educational process. It also gives them a chance to review the lesson and go over the material again.

Assignments give teachers the ability to track student progress and to see if the student understands the lesson content.

Microsoft’s Office 365 now provides another educational tool in their arsenal of productivity apps. Teams is a collaboration tool for your classes with the ability to have discussion threads, document sharing, class notebooks (see my previous post) and assignments.

In this post I’m going to focus on the assignment aspect of teams. You can follow the video guide or the blog post below, I hope this helps you get the most out of Microsoft Teams!

How to view assignments for your class

Inside your class, click on the “Assignments” tab to view a timeline of all the set assignments for this group.

You can select either a horizontal or vertical timeline view of the assignments using the view selector (highlighted yellow below).

How to create a new assignment

To start setting work for students, click the “New assignment” button.

You are then prompted to enter the details of the new assignment

Assign to: Select which classes to assign to (you can set it to more than one of your classes here!)
Title: This is the title of the assignment.
Instructions: Include a description here to help the student complete the assignment.
Due date and time: When the assignment becomes late (you have the option to allow late hand-in below)
Late turn-in allowed: If this is enabled, students can still hand-in work after the due date. This is required if you are using class notebook pages.
Points: Turn this on to allow a mark allocation. Currently these are only available as a number score.

Documents can be added from OneDrive, your computer or from the OneNote Class Notebook. We are hopeful that SharePoint and other class teams will be added to this soon! There are two options for attaching these resources.

Attach reference materials

These documents are for the student to view as part of the assignment. You might include a PowerPoint, links to useful websites, etc.

Specify what students will turn in

Documents uploaded in this section can be edited by the student and submitted back as part of the assignment. This is particularly useful for things like worksheets.

When you have finished the assignment, you can either save it as a draft or assign it to the class. As soon as this is assigned to the class, it will appear in their assignment timeline and they will get a notification on their team mobile and desktop apps.

How to review completed assignments

Use the review button to bring up the assignment timeline and assignment submissions.

Select the relevant assignment from the timeline to show the student work.

Each student has:

Student work: Links to files that the student has returned.
Date turned in: The date and time that the student submitted their assignment.
Feedback: Some written feedback for the student.
Points: If you have chosen to enable this in your assignment, you can give the student a grade.

Students will not be able to see your feedback or grade until the “Post” button is clicked.

Click the “Export to Excel” button to download a spreadsheet of the assignments.

The grades spreadsheet shows all the assignments set to this class over the school year. It optionally shows grades, if enabled per assignment. No more manual marksheets! You could use this data to import or fill in MIS marksheets quicker.

Mobile Apps

One of the best ways to engage with students both inside and outside of school using Teams is to encourage them to use the mobile app. Students get instant notifications of any mentions, homework or graded assignments.

Teams automation and customisation

Teams is free for schools, check you have the license enabled to start using it. At Cloud Design Box, we can provision teams from MIS data and create an engaging and simple dashboard to access team data in SharePoint. We can also create student folders inside team sites and extend the experience even further, making it easier and increasing student and teacher engagement. You can find out more information on our website https://www.clouddesignbox.co.uk/.

Back to School – Microsoft Teams Update for Education

September is here and new collaboration tools are being tried for the first time in Office 365.

Microsoft Teams now has class sites, watch my full review in my blog post earlier this summer

Latest updates include:

Options to disable chat
Full screen Class Notebooks
Fully working Class Notebooks with settings available
OneNote Edit in browser functionality
Ability to add links to assignments

Still some functionality we are still waiting for:

Teams mobile app to support assignments and notebooks
Option to add SharePoint files to assignments
Share resources between classes
Assign Class Notebook page

Video about the latest updates:

Original review (from July) in full:

What are your thoughts on Microsoft Teams? As good as Microsoft Classroom yet? What features do you want to see?

Tag Archives: Class Teams