Here you can find the transcript of Episode #126 of PiaSys TechBites.

Welcome back to PiaSys TechBites. Today, we complete the series of videos about setting up and leveraging a Microsoft 365 EDU for your school in order to provide remote training services to your students. And specifically, today, I want to focus on the end user. So, on the teacher and student experience, point of view. Microsoft Teams is for sure the main tool that you can use in a Microsoft 365 EDU, to provide remote training services, and specifically every single class of your school might be a team in Microsoft Teams.

In there, you can define assignments for your students using, for example, Microsoft forms to define quizzes or assignments. You can provide a score to your users and they can see their grades. You can use tools like OneNote, and generally speaking all of the Office 365 platform to build a training content that you can share with OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.

And you can use Microsoft Teams for online training content, like video conferences, where you provide training content live, and there, you can leverage the latest capabilities of Microsoft Teams, like for example, the Together mode, to see the whole classroom in a unique picture, the Raise Your Hand functionality to ask questions, the Spotlight and so on and so forth. So, like always let’s move to the Demo environment and let’s see how to play with Microsoft Teams in order to provide training content in a classroom.

So, here we are in Microsoft Teams, and here we see the classes that my user is able to access. For example, we have the math class that we created through the School Data Sync, and we can see that there are two students waiting to join. Why? Because the class is now created and visible to the owners only, meaning the teacher and the staff people, but it will not be available to the students as long as we don’t activate it for the students by clicking on this activate button, so that we can configure the classes we like, so, I can click on manage team.

I can configure, for example, in the settings, the team and the picture for my team, this is the math class. So, we can select something which is meaningful for a math class. Let me use this one, for example, and I can update the icon of my classroom.

Then, I can configure in the class notebook, any of the content that I want to share with my students. And I can also play with assignments and grades in my classroom. In fact, I can assign tasks to my students, for example, a school work or a homework to do and stuff like that. So, I can go to assignments and in assignments I can start creating new assignments for my students.

For example, I can create a new assignment, something to do, the assignment will be, “Do something by the end of the week,” just to make an example, we will have to provide some instructions, “Some random instructions”. Of course, in a real assignment, you will do real stuff. This assignment will give up to 10 points to the students who will provide the results of the assignment, will be in the math class, assigned to all of these students of the math class.

And it will be due by let’s say next week, so the 10th of November, and this will be the due time. Then, I can provide these assignment to all of these students in the general channel of my class, so I can assign it.

And that’s it. Now I have an assignment for my students, meaning that now I will switch to a user account, and I will show you the user experience from a student point of view. But before doing that, I will have to grant access to all of these students to this classroom, which is something that I have to do by clicking on the activate button at the top of the screen.

So, let me do that right now. Let me click on “Activate”. I will confirm that I want to activate my class and now my class is active. So, all of the students will be able to see the class.

So, here I am, Student01 I can click on my Microsoft teams and I can see the teams that I belong to, and clearly see that I belong to the math team. I can go here. And in the general channel, I can see that I have an assignment. By clicking on “View assignment”, I can see what the assignment is.

I can add my work from here, which can be a document that I have in my OneDrive, or it can be something that I want to upload from my file system, which is what I will do right now. So, for example, I have a sample document that I want to upload right here. Let me get this one. And once I’ve done that, I’m done with my homework and I can turn in so that I will provide my result to the teacher waiting for me.

So, if I switch back again to the teacher account, here we can see that in the general channel, I have the assignment that I provided. If I click on the list of assignments, I can see that I have my assignment. One of the students turned it in. If I click on it, I can see that Student01 turned in his work, so, I can click on his work.

I can see the document. I can provide a feedback, which is for example, 8/10, and I will return the assignment to the student. If I close it, I can see that now I still have Student02, which is pending providing the assignment. And that’s one option that we have as a teacher, more over in the assignments, we can also create a quiz for our students. So, I can go back, I can create a new quiz, for example, it will be based on Microsoft Forms and I can create a new quiz from scratch.

So, I would provide a title, “My quiz for math class”, and I will add, for example, a new question, which can be a choice, “What color is the sky?” And options will be Azure or Dark. And this will be my quiz, my really simple quiz. So, I can share it if I want. I can get the URL to share it or whatever else, but what I want to do after having a look at the preview, is to use this quiz as the input for my class.

So, I can go back and I can create a new assignment based on the “My quiz for my class” that I just created. So, let me use it, let me assign it to all of the students again in the math class. And that’s it. All of the students will have to provide the feedback on this quiz. Let me assign it to the students.

And again, it’s done. So, if we switch back to the Student01 account, here we can see in the general channel, we have a new assignment, which is my quiz. I can view the assignment and by clicking on it, I will be able to provide my feedback. And for me, the sky today is Azure. So, let me submit my response. I can view the results.

And as a teacher, again, I can see what the status is for my assignment. So, let me switch back to the assignments, just to show you. And here we have one out of two returned quiz results and again Students01. Let me show the result. And we can see that the response from Student01 is Azure. And I can again provide some points to the student, for example, five points, which is an extra credit, because this is just a quiz, at the end of a training path.

So, that’s it. And here you can see how we can play with assignments. If I go to grades, we can see all of the results for my students, for example, for every single assignment, we can see the result that we gave to our students. And as such, we have a really powerful tool to teach and to be in touch with our students.

Of course, using Teams, we can also chat with all of the students in the classroom, or we can have a private chat with the specific student, so, I can send a message, for example, to Student01 and say, “Very good job, very good job. Well done.” And if I will send a message to the student, the student in Microsoft Teams will get the message in the chat, you see? And of course, we can also start a live meeting with Microsoft Teams, video conferences, capabilities in order to have a direct one-to-one chat with a student or to provide a training in the class.

So, as a teacher, I can, for example, “Go to my team”, and again, in the general channel, I can “Start a new meeting” or I can “Schedule a meeting” so that I will define a lesson, an online lessons for all of my students, which will be able to attend the lesson or to see the recording of the lessons, if they will not be available when I’m providing live lesson. So, really powerful tools to provide remote training to the users.

Like always, thank you for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed this series of videos about Microsoft 365 Education. In this pandemic timeframe, I think it is really useful to provide content about this topic to help schools, to embrace the new demanding needs from the community, the needs to provide remote training to students, despite the pandemic timeframe. So, thank you again for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it and please subscribe to this channel. Thank you.