This is our top 10 tips for getting more out of Office 365 as a teacher and with your students. There's even a bonus eleventh because we just couldn't leave it out.
Learning Tools
Microsoft provides a selection of tools to make reading and writing easier with Office 365. Learning tools are available for OneNote and Microsoft Word - online, on desktop and iPad app.
Learning tools can be found under the ‘View’ toolbar in Word
With Learning tools you can:
- Adjust the page colour and invert black & white – these are useful to support pupils with dyslexia to be able to read the screen.
- Adjust text spacing – you can space words out more to make them easier to focus on and read.
- Syllables – Word can break words down into syllables, again useful to support reading
- Read aloud – This is really useful to support children’s writing. Enabling them to quickly and easily access what they have written. This helps them to develop meaning in their writing, supports their own self correction of their work.
There some differences between the tools depending on whether your online, desktop or iPad. You can find out about Learning Tools for each device here.
Learning Tools are available for OneNote and you can read more about Learning Tools for OneNote .
Office Lens
Another often overlooked useful mobile app for Office365 is Office Lens. You can download the Office Lens app from your usual app store.
With the Office Lens app you can use your device camera for observations and then choose where to save the picture – either directly into your OneDrive or onto a OneNote page.
If you’re using OneNote to record observations of younger children into their Class Notebook sections – using Office Lens is a great way to easily get pictures.
If you’re using the iPad app for OneNote it’s even quicker – you can choose insert and select the camera.
Microsoft Teams – to reduce School Governors paperwork
Governing body meetings can create a huge volume of paper and many schools are still printing everything for governors. Microsoft Teams is a great way of reducing that reliance on printed paper AND can also make governors meetings more effective.
Create Office365 accounts for your governors, with the new GDPR regulations it’s good practice to ensure Governors have a school related email account that they are using for Governing body business.
Then you can easily create a Team for Governors, where you can store paperwork in the 'files' tab, broken down by committee’s or in any way that works best for you and your governors.
The next stage is to encourage Governors to discuss items online outside of the meeting. If you create a ‘Channel’ for each committee then you can differentiate the discussion topics. This allows governors to be involved and share thoughts and views outside of formal meetings. Your governing body meetings could then be sharper and more focussed, providing a forum to summarise the online discussions and making decisions.
