Teams for Education is here and is the new way to communicate and collaborate within Office 365, we’ve been busy over the Summer preparing Skooler to work with Teams. We’ll have some news to share on Teams and Skooler in the next few weeks, which will make using both together really easy.
Until then here’s 4 ‘Best Practice’ tips for Teams which we think will help you get started.
- For new groups or classes, start with Teams. Create the Class Notebook within the Team.
Creating the Class Notebook within Teams is a much easier to way to manage it – as the student sections are automatically created for Team members, they’ll also be automatically created if you add new members to the Team.
The other big advantage is that the Class Notebook is not sitting in an individual teachers OneDrive area – this means that if you have a change of staff and the original Notebook creator leaves, you won’t lose access to the Notebook.
(You can’t yet migrate existing Notebooks into Teams, this is coming, so the above is best when you are starting from scratch with a new Notebook for a new class or group)
- Turn off Assignment within Teams.
Teams has it’s own Assignment functionality, but with less functionality than Skooler Assignment. Skooler will become fully integrated into Teams over the next few weeks. So to avoid confusing Teachers and Students within two different ways to create Assignments, we suggest your Office 365 administrator should disable the Teams Assignment functionality from the admin console. There’s some information here.
- Remember the Team is for everyone
Unlike sharing folders or files within OneDrive, files or folders you create within your Team are accessible to all Team members. So information you only want Staff to have access to should be created within a ‘Staff Only’ team.
- Give all Teachers access to training on Microsoft Teams with Skooler Academy
Skooler Academy has over 30 courses on both Office 365 and Skooler functionality, delivered through video’s and online tests, supported with live Webinars. There’s an introduction to Teams course, with more coming, when we release the full Skooler Teams app.
Find out more about Skooler Academy here
