Every year on BETT, Microsoft announce new prodcuts and/or features related to EDU. This year was no different, let me introduce you to Class Materials.
Microsoft Teams for Education is extremely popular among teachers, but the open architecture of Teams is far from that of learning management systems and other tools teachers are used to.
Consider sharing resources for an upcoming assignment, or a week plan with homework for the coming weeks, only to realize at a later time that a clever student has altered the content, removed all homework or worse…
Introducing Class Materials
Luckily that’s about to change with the introduction of Class Materials!
Class Materials is a special folder available within the files area of the class team, read-only for students while leaving full permissions for teachers. That’s right, anything the teacher place in that folder stays untouched.
Let’s create a new document in the Class Materials folder…
…and open in SharePoint.
You can see on the left side there is a section called Class Materials, and on the right there is a Manage access area. Let’s investigate.
If you click Manage access the permission panel will open.
The owner (teacher) will always have full access while you can see that the members (yellow) only have view access. Also any guests (red) only have view access.
To be fair, this announcement isn’t huge, something similar could already be acomplished by manually tweaking SharePoint permissions. But it’s good to see the platform maturing, Microsoft listens to their customers and Class Materials will definitely make things easier for teachers.
Teams.rocks 
How to restore this folder when accedently deleted this folder classmaterials in the files tab in teams
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Well I haven’t tried myself but did you check the recycle bin in SharePoint? Due to the custom permissions it might be a different document library, site or something like that (not fluent in SP terminology).
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Thank you for your response. I was able to restore it by opening cloud storage.
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When a new document is added to class materials, there is no notification generated. Is there any option to send a notification to students?
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Nothing out of the box, but you could use Power Automate or even SharePoint alerts to accomplish something like that. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/create-an-alert-to-get-notified-when-a-file-or-folder-changes-in-sharepoint-e5a79e7b-a146-46da-a9ef-d65409ba8918
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Can students download a file posted in class materials?
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I see no reason why not, since they would be able to copy the content from within the document either way, but haven’t tested this myself.
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Is there a way to see which students have accessed a file in classroom materials? Or who have even accessed that folder?
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From a global admin perspective this is logged, but these logs are not available to teachers. If you need more insights into student activity there is a dedicated Insights app for class teams that teachers can add that is being updated with lots more insights soon.
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Can i upload video files in Class Materials for student to just view? I would like the students to just watch the video but not download it. Is that possible?
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They would still be able to download it from Class Materials, but if you record in Stream (or upload) they won’t be able to download the video.
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Can students print class materials?
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Yes, they should able to download, print etc, just not make any changes to the documents within the folder.
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I’m seeing evidence that students are able to modify files in the Class Materials folder. I don’t think they are doing anything nefarious, but it is a problem
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If that is the case, please file a support ticket using help – report a problem (or using the admin center).
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