Tag Archives: Independent School

Digital transformation in a leading independent boarding school

Head of Digital Learning at a leading independent school talks about how using Microsoft 365 has developed and improved teaching and learning.  

Henry Exham currently teaches at a boarding school with 830 students ranging from 13-18. He joins our COO Darren Hemming to talk about how the school utilises Microsoft 365 and how it can be useful for independent schools looking to improve and develop their teaching and learning.  



 

Improving communication in an independent boarding school with SharePoint. 

Communication is essential in a large boarding school, Henry points out. With students living on campus, there is a lot more ground to cover when it comes to communicating about extracurricular activities and “school-home” life alongside their academic timetables.  

“We’re interested in providing a whole-person education and technology has been an important part of our journey over the last five years,” says Henry. 

The SharePoint site that Cloud Design Box has created with the school acts as a central hub and offers information for anything a student or teacher may need for their daily life at the school.  

With a feed of updates and news, students can keep up to date with ongoing activities, such as sports, music lessons and school announcements.  

Meanwhile, staff have access to up-to-date information about what’s going on in the school and links to staff-only areas where they can find resources.  

“It’s great having one central place to go, and it links to all of our other systems, so everyone knows to go to SharePoint first to find what they’re looking for.” 

The home site offers personalised features, meaning when users log in, they get content tailored to them. For example, reminders, upcoming assignments and events.  

“SharePoint really joins all the facets of daily life in the school,” Henry adds.

Onboarding an independent boarding school to Microsoft 365

Head of Digital Learning at a leading independent boarding school reveals 5 ways in which they have successfully onboarded staff and students to Microsoft 365, Teams and SharePoint.

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The benefits of subject sites in SharePoint.  

Centralised subject sites place resources for one subject into easy-to-access areas for students and staff. Driven by MIS data, the subject sites have a document library for each year group.  

In the podcast, Henry shares how this setup has been beneficial for the school:  

“They’re fantastic as it allows teachers to quickly share large numbers of files with students without sending emails or things getting lost in their inboxes,” he explains. 

“One example is GCSE past papers that we uploaded for Year 11 only. It’s great because we know that year group will need to have access to that when the time comes, but it’s separate from the other year groups.” 

Creating long-term resources in OneNote. 

OneNote has been particularly useful in Henry’s school, allowing teachers to collaborate, share and build on each other learning resources.  

“Most of our teachers use Class Notebook, which is attached to the corresponding Class Team so everything is in one place for the student,” Henry describes. 

“We’ve got a Biology team just for the teachers of the subject and any Notebook pages we create for our classes we put them back into the shared OneNote so they can be reused and built upon.”  

A vision for the future. 

With technology and digital learning continuously developing, Henry wishes to delve further to look at the “more interesting” features of Teams and Microsoft 365.

Henry is particularly interested in AI technology and mentions that he can already see how this is going to be beneficial in education:

“PowerPoint offers an automated caption feature. Captions are time-consuming and may not be something teachers include in their presentations. But this new feature can add captions instantly,” he says.

With Year 9, he is keen to incorporate technology into each subject, showing students the digital skills they’ll be expected to have in their future workplaces. He wants this initiative to spread further through each year group, including Sixth Form, who will need these skills as they enter the workplace or higher education.

If you want to know more about Cloud Design Box and how we can help your school or MAT harness the full power of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, book a free demo today.  

Catch up on all the episodes of our podcast on YouTube, Spotify or on our website.

5 top tips for adopting Microsoft 365 from a leading independent boarding school

Head of Digital Learning at a leading independent boarding school reveals 5 ways in which they have successfully onboarded staff and students to Microsoft 365, Teams and SharePoint.

Henry Exham currently teaches at a boarding school with 830 students ranging from 13-18. In our latest podcast, he joins COO Darren Hemming and Trainer & Solutions Consultant Joe Scott to talk about the challenges and successes of getting everyone in the school on board with Microsoft 365.

The school has worked with Cloud Design Box to harness the full power of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, developing a clear, long-term user adoption strategy and embedding the new technology across all facets of school life.

Improving communication at an independent school

Discover how this independent school is transforming communication and developing teaching and learning with Microsoft 365, Teams and SharePoint

Learn more →

Below, we’ve rounded up Henry’s top tips for adopting Microsoft 365 in an independent boarding school.

Identify champions to help you spread the word.

From the early stages of adopting Microsoft 365, Henry identified the key champions of the software – those teachers who had already been using the Microsoft Suite in their lessons and teaching:

“We had some good leaders in the pack already, who could help us spread the word.”

Start small.

Moving over to a whole new software, with new systems and processes can be overwhelming, so Henry suggests starting small and keeping things simple at first.

The first step was making it mandatory for teachers to set assignments and homework in Teams to get them using the software. Then Henry slowly ramped it up so it grew organically from there.

“You’re not going to convert every teacher overnight. So, we started off very gently with Teams and made everything really simple. Asking them to set all homework via Teams and showing them how they could upload resources too, but this wasn’t essential at this stage.”

Invest in training.

With the support of Cloud Design Box training up different areas of the school, Henry organised a focused teaching and learning week called “Teams week”:

“I created over 50 YouTube training videos, where I went through some of the basics of Teams and SharePoint, organising them into different levels so teachers could pick the level they were at and commit to learning something new that week,” he explains

“Everybody upskilled that week, improving their knowledge of Microsoft 365.”

Henry has also committed to onboarding new staff that join the school, providing four hours of IT training in their first term.

Give a reason to be engaged.

Embedding Microsoft 365 into the school’s digital learning strategy has helped everyone in the school understand its benefits and get onboard:

“Ultimately, our digital strategy is to prepare our students to be learners outside of education and prepare them for their future workplace or higher education, with the right digital skills. Teams fits well with this as it’s used in organisations all over the world. We’re building skills for the future and it’s easy to sell in that way.”

Build it into the curriculum.

To further achieve this digital strategy, Henry has created a digital skills curriculum for Year 9 students to integrate Teams into all their subjects. For example, creating spreadsheets in science and wordprocessing in history:

“A lot of people expect the younger generation to have IT skills as they are ‘digital natives’. But, just because they know how to scroll on a smartphone, doesn’t mean they know how to format a spreadsheet or document,” he adds.

“One example of this is setting them a task in English to create a blog about their favourite book, but they have to use Teams to create a full announcement, add an image, link to a YouTube video and post to the dedicated Teams channel.”

If you want to know more about Cloud Design Box and how we can help your school or MAT harness the full power of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, book a free demo today.  

Catch up on all the episodes of our podcast on YouTube, Spotify or on our website.

New to Teams: View assignment history and hand in student work in Teams  

The ability to hand in work on behalf of students in Microsoft Teams Assignments has been long-awaited by teachers, alongside being able to view assignment history of individual students. 

In this guide, we show you how to view assignment history and submit student work as a teacher in Teams Assignments.



How to view assignment history in Microsoft Teams Assignments. 

Viewing assignment history is particularly useful as it helps you as a teacher get an overview of where the student is with the assignment – whether they’ve viewed the work, if they’ve attempted to complete it or if they need more guidance.  

It also cuts out the excuse of “not knowing about the homework”, because you can now see if they really viewed the task or not.  

  1. Go into one of your assignments in Teams and view the list of students who have been set this work. 
  2. Select a student to open up their assignment. 
  3. In the left-hand side marking panel, select View History. This brings up an overview of where the student is with the assignment.

View assignment history in Teams

In this example, we can see that we set the work on 11/05/2022 at 14:11 and Susan viewed it around 20 minutes later.  

View assignment history in Teams example - viewed

Here’s what it looks like when the student has handed in their work. 

View assignment history in Teams example - handed in

 

How to hand in work on behalf of a student in Microsoft Teams Assignments. 

A much-anticipated feature in Teams is the ability for teachers to take actions on behalf of students – for example, upload files and turn in work for students. 

  1. Go into one of your assignments in Teams and view the list of students who have been set this work. 
  2. Select a student to open up their assignment. 
  3. Select Take action in student view in the left-hand side marking panel.  
  4. From here, you can attach files and select Hand in to hand in their assignment on their behalf.  
  5. The student and teacher have the option to Undo hand-in.  

Turn in assignments on behalf of students

Note: The assignment history will tell you whether the assignment has been turned in by the student or the teacher. 

If you would like to find out more about our Cloud Box platform and how we can help extend Microsoft 365 in your school or MAT, book a free demo today.

How to access subject resources in CDB Class Teams | Student Guide

When working in Microsoft Teams, each Class Team that you’re a member of contains a tab where important subject resources can be viewed.



Access a resource library for your class by selecting the tab at the top of your Class Team.

In this example, it’s a Year 11 English student accessing their Year 11 English subject library.  

Click the resource tab in your Class Team to access resources

This is where your teachers store all of the resources for that topic.  

This folder is read-only to students, so you cannot edit the resources, but you may download your own copy if you wish to make annotations. 

Often, a teacher will assign this work to you and you can edit the file and return it to them for marking.  

You can also open up resource libraries in SharePoint by selecting Open in SharePoint. This takes you to the same folder in your school intranet.

student resources

You can view all subject site resources at any time from the school megamenu. 

View all your subjects in your school's megamenu

These libraries remain available to you every year, so you can access old topics as you move up through the years in your school.  

Resource libraries for that class.If you would like to find out more about our Cloud Box platform and how we can help extend Microsoft 365 in your school or MAT, book a free demo today. 

How to get a notification every time a student submits a late assignment

The late turn in notification in Microsoft Teams Assignments allows you to be alerted if a student hands in their homework late.

The notification appears in the bottom corner of your screen, as well as the activity bell in the top-left of your Microsoft Teams.

This can be activated per assignment, or for all assignments in your class. It’s a handy feature that enables you to quickly identify if your students have submitted their assignments on time.

Turn on the late turn in notification for one assignment. 

  1. In Class Notebook, select Assignment. 
  2. Create your assignment as you would usually – fill in the information and set a deadline etc.  
  3. Under Settings, there’s an option to Receive notifications for late turn ins. Select Yes. 
  4. Select Assign to send out the assignment. Your late turn in notification is activated for this assignment.  

 

Turning on late turn in notification announcment for one assignment

Turn on the late turn in notification for all assignments. 

There’s also a way to set up a late turn in notification for all your assignments in a class.  

  1. Go into your Assignments in Class Teams. 
  2. Select Settings in the top right corner.
  3. Under Notifications, there’s an option to Receive notifications for late turn ins. Select Yes. 

From now on, notifications for late submissions will be turned on for all your assignments.  

Note: This only applies to your selected class. To activate the notifications for another class, you need to repeat this process in the Class Notebook Assignment tab for your other classes. 

 If you would like to find out more about our Cloud Box platform and how we can help extend Microsoft 365 in your school or MAT, book a free demo today.