June is great month to release new functionality in EDU tools, when school is out in large parts of the world. In this post I will introduce you to some of the latest announcements from Microsoft, and discuss what this means in education.

But first, lets take a moment to reflect on the past. Teams for Education just turned one year, and what a year it has been!

Classrooms all over the world are experiencing transformation, students are given a voice, and inclusive and engaging learning environments have been created.

New features

Let’s have a look at some of the features announced lately.

Page locking

First up is one that I know educators have been longing for. Page locking in OneNote Class Notebook is finally rolling out. Not only that, using Teams teachers can set pages to automatically lock when the assignment hits the due date!

Rubric grading

Another common request has been for students to be able to see how they’ll be assessed upfront, before starting the assignment. With rubric criteria and skills-based grading Microsoft introduces that, while also saving teachers time allowing them to easily grade multiple assignments at once.

Rubric grading is the first feature brought to Teams for EDU with the hiring of Chalkup co-founder and CEO Justing Chando.

Forms in assignments

Another great addition to assignments in Microsoft Teams will be the posibility to add a Form to a new assignment. As soon as the student returns the form it can be graded automatically and the score as well as any feedback will be written back to the grade book.

Reuse a team as a template

Reusing an existing team as a template when creating a new one was announced a while back, let’s see what that actually looks like.

First click Join or create a team.

Choose create team.

Pick a team type.

Give the team a name and choose Create a team using an existing team as a template.

Next up you will have to choose which team to use as a template.

And then choose what to bring over from the existing team.

At this time you can choose to bring over channels, tabs, team settings, apps and/or members. If you need to copy files you can accomplish that from within the SharePoint document library.

Join codes

Join codes was also announced a while back and should be rolling out in the coming weeks. This will enable educators to easily get a group of students into the team by sending them a code.

To get the code, the teacher needs to hit the three dots (…), also known as more, followed by Manage team, and then Settings. They can then generate a code under Team code.

You will be presented with a code…

…that you can copy and send to students or other invitees.

Invitees will have to choose to join or create a team, followed by Join a team with a code.

Unsuprisingly entering the code and hitting Join team will take them to the associated team.

Archive teams

This is a big one. While we obviously need to automate this in larger environments, archiving teams is a welcome feature entering end of school year. This feature will according to Microsoft let you safely store your team content in read-only mode to use as a reference while setting up your Teams experience for the next school year.

Let’s have a look at how this could look, in the not so distand future.

In the Manage teams page you could get an overview of all your teams, click … (more) followed by Archive Team.

Hitting the Archive button will, well… not surprisingly archive the team.

All team activity will be frozen, or read-only, while you’re still able to add or remove members who might need access to team data.

Once archived you will have the option to restore or delete the team.

For more information about these lates announcements, see the Microsoft Education blog post.

The people behind the success

Before we move on with even more news, I would like to both congratulate and give thanks to some of the people behind this amazing product.

This is a picture of the Teams for Education team shared on Twitter,  (hope it’s OK that I use it). Happy one year anniversary and keep up the excellent work, Teams rocks!

Uservoice

Last but not least I thought I would update you on some of the latest updates coming from Uservoice. For those who are not familiar with Uservoice, it’s a product feedback platform that allow Microsoft and others to prioritize feature requests and gain insights into customers wishes and requirements.

You can either vote for an idea or feature request or you can submit your own if your request doesn’t match one already registered.

Microsoft Teams in general has a uservoice at microsoftteams.uservoice.com, and there is a collection of education related uservoice sites at edu.uservoice.com. Microsoft Teams for Education has a dedicated UserVoice, let’s have a look at some of the recent updates.

It is important to know that even though a feature request could be tagged with ie. planned, working on it or partially done, Microsoft does not give any guarantees as to if and when it will actually surface within the product.

Integrate Assignments with calendar

This feature will insert assignments info into students Outlook calendars, effectively enabling them to easily see whats due when.

Add ability for Parents/Gaurdians to view assignments, etc.

Parent insights is crucial and while I would prefer a more comprehensive parent portal a weekly email digest is certainly a welcome addition.

Those who require more learning tools integrated with Teams, such as a parent portal or an app with attendance, week plans and more, can get this today with 3rd party tools like Skooler.

Bring the waffle menu into teams online experience

While not a big thing, easy access to other tools in Office 365 is good for usability.

The waffle will only be available while using Teams in the browser.

Ability to prevent students from editing files

Making sure students don’t remove their homework from the week plan or accidentaly remove important information from within a document shared in the team has been a top request by teachers since the release of Teams for Education, and it now looks like it’s finally coming.

Teachers could accomplish something similar today by adding files or folders from an external SharePoint document library, where permissions are separate from those within the team. It is however a cumbersome process so baking this into Teams makes perfect sense.

Different assessment grade/points formats

Custom grading like pass, fail etc. is also something that teachers have been requesting for some time.

Make sure to follow the uservoice links to vote, and leave your email address if you would like to be updated with any changes in status going forward.

That is all for now, If you like my work please share in social media and or in the comments below.

In this post I will show you the recently announced assignment features in Teams for Education.

In a recent blog post on Microsoft Tech Community,  Microsoft Education Principal Program Manager Justin Chando just shared some great news for education users.

You can now post assignments to individuals or small groups, schedule assignments for later, allow students to undo their turn in and allow teachers to return an assignment with feedback so that students can keep on improving it.

Some of you might remember that I demoed the latter, the assignments return flow, in my session How to Deploy and Use Teams for Education in Your School District, during the Learn Teams Conference in the beginning of April.

Nevertheless, let me walk you through the new features one by one.

Assign to individuals or small groups

Often times you have students working in groups, or an individual or a subset of the class with special needs. Instead of giving the same assignment to the whole class…

…you can now assign one that is custom made, reducing outsideness.

Schedule assignments for later

Another feature that has been longed for by educators is the possibility to schedule an assignment. While you have always been able to create a draft, to manually publish when ready, it surely fits the organized educator even more to be able to create assignments in advance to release on schedule. You can now accomplish this, literally by the flip of a switch.

The assignments return flow

Educators wanting to practice formative assessment are now in luck, let’s see how we can accomplish this in the latest update of Teams for Education.

First, we need to create and publish an assignment. Below we have set a due date, allowed late turn-in, attached some instructions and added a word document for the student to turn in.

When a student turns in the assignment…

…he or she will have the possibility to undo the turn in for further improvement.

Students can turn in and undo submissions as many times they need until the due date.

Often times though, it is the teacher who would like to return an assignment with some feedback, to encourage students to improve even further.

Teachers can return the assignment to one or more students with some feedback, which will let the student(s) know with a notification. The status will change to returned, showing the date and time.

And there is more!

The announcement also showed rich text editing for assignment instructions, where educators can bold, highlight and more.

The above screenshot was copied from the original blog post, as this feature was not flighted in my preview tenant at the time of writing.

  Turn in celebrations

Last but not least for assignments are turn in celebrations. It’s obviously not a huge feature, but it will encourage some students for sure, which in itself is important.

This is all I can share for now, but rest assured, more great features will surface in Teams for Education before the summer is over!

If you enjoy my work, please share in social media or comment below. Same thing goes if there is something you think I should blog about, thank you for reading.

In this article I will show you how to setup School Data Sync to automate your Teams for Education environment, as well as discuss the benefits and highlight some important considerations.

School Data Sync, from Microsoft, is a free service in Office 365 Education. It takes data about Students, teachers, class rosters and more, from the Student Information System, and use that data to create and license users in Azure Active Directory and Office 365, create classes in Microsoft Teams, complete with teachers and students, and more.

School Data Sync, or SDS, integrates with 78 Student Information Systems at the time of writing. For Student Informations Systems not on the list, chances are you could still make it work, which I will discuss in a second.

But before we move on, I’d like to continue with why you should setup School Data Sync. First of all, Classes in Teams won’t necessarily update dynamically if you create them manually and add a group from Azure AD. When new students arrive, teachers will have to add them to every team. Same goes for students moving from one school to another.

If you have more than a few schools, you really don’t want teachers or IT admins spending the first week after summer break moving students in and out of classes in Teams.

School Data Sync also lets you get the term start and end dates from the Student Information System, which you could use to automate archiving of classes End Of Year.

There are a whole range of other use cases when SDS is up an running, like dynamic application delivery if you manage school PCs with Intune for Education, but that’s a story for another day.

Most Student Information Systems integrating with systems like Learning Management Systems, have the option to do so using XML files in a format like IMS. School Data Sync however, if you’re not using the API, require six CSV-files in a proprietary format.

Microsoft has a set of example CSVs on Github, which I have customized slightly below.

The above examples show the bare minimum of what you need to get started with SDS, there are however a range of other properties you could add which I will cover later.

You should have all this information in the SIS XML file, so all you need to do is to create a script or small piece of software to parse the data in the XML file into six CSVs that SDS accepts.

When you have these CSVs, you’re ready to start syncing your Student Information System with School Data Sync. Let’s have a look at how you can accomplish that.

First you need to navigate to sds.microsoft.com and log on with global admin credentials. You can there click add a profile…

…give it a name, choose to upload CSVs in SDS format and click Start.

If your users already exist in Azure AD, choose Existing users. Otherwise, and you would need to have usernames and passwords in the teacher and student CSVs, choose New users and the service will provision accounts on your behalf.

Click Upload Files followed by Add Files, browse to and choose your CSVs and hit Upload.

Select school and section properties, remember that these must exist in the CSV files. As a bare minimum you need SIS ID and Name for schools and SIS ID, School SIS IS and Section Name for sections.

ProTip: Term StartDate and EndDate could come in handy later for automation purposes.

When all that is done, you have the option to replace unsupported special characters that may exist in the files, to make sure that the synchronization doesn’t stop just because of a dollar ($) sign or a dash (/).

You can also choose whether or not section group display names should persist when changed by the teacher, and set a date for when students should be able to view their classes.

Select the domain, properties and licenses for both teachers…

…and students. And hit Next.

The last page will let you review all your settings and finally create the profile. Setting everything up til take a few minutes.

When complete choose Start Sync.

Refresh the page after a while, please bare in mind that a sync like this can take some time, depending of the amount of users and groups you are syncing.

When the sync is complete, choose Your Organization in the menu on the left, and pick your school to see what has been synced.

You can also open either the Office 365 admin center and search for the teacher, students and classes…

…or of course just open Microsoft Teams with a teacher account to see that everything is OK.

You can see the classes are created, as well as teacher and students, and we’re good to go.

One thing I think is important for a successful roll out though, is to consider whether you should create class teams, subject teams or a mix of both. You need to discuss this internally before you setup School Data Sync, since your decision most likely will affect the configuration.

My experience is that it gets complex for the youngest students if they are assigned many teams, which is why teachers in lower grades sometimes rename one team to something like “Class 2B” and then add one channel for each subject.

This however introduces a few other challenges. The built-in assignments app is team centric, there is no way to add a math assignments tab in the math channel and so on.

Also there is currently only one class notebook for each team, if the class notebook is used a lot it could end up very large causing sync issues.

My point is that you need to think about these things before you roll out hundreds or perhaps thousands of teams, in order to avoid a bad user experience for students and teachers.

Make sure to also check the Microsoft Teams release notes, since these issues might have been resolved by the time you read this. You can also vote for the ability to add existing class notebooks on UserVoice, which would be a huge step in the right direction.

Again, if you appreciate my work please share on social media or comment below, and if there is something you think I should write about please let me know!

Want to switch tenants, to check on teams where you are a guest, while working on a mobile device? Read on…

While the biggest news lately regarding guest access, definetly was the announcement about guest access for consumer accounts (anyone with an email address can now be invited to join your team), another nice feature I was recently made aware of is switching tenants on an android device.

Not much to it, let’s dive right in…

First open your Teams app and hit settings in the upper left corner.

In the settings menu expand Your accounts.

You will get a list of available guest accounts.

Pick a guest account and you will be signed into the appropriate tenant.

There you are, enjoy your guest access on the go! That is if you have an Android device, since iOS isn’t supported as of this writing.

UPDATE March 14th: Tenant switching is now available also in the Microsoft Teams app on iOS.

In this article I will give you a quick overview of the /commands, as well as show you some of the latest design updates in Teams, and the nifty new quick reply feature.

With more than 1250 votes at the time of writing, /slash commands are a top request on the UserVoice for Microsoft Teams.

While millennials (no offence) might think slash commands were invented by Teams rival Slack, my first encounter with these action specific shortcuts were actually in the early days of Internet (yeah, I’m that old), in the once so popular chat service IRC.

At the risk of making this into a history lesson, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) clients would most often connect to an open chat network, where one could join #channels. Similar to Teams, channels would keep conversations organized by topics, demographics etc. Slash commands like /join /away /help and /invite, were used for common tasks like… you guessed it, joining a channel or inviting a guest.

Before we jump into the /commands, lets take a quick look at the original design of the Microsoft Teams desktop or web client. In the bottom left corner you see the profile picture, which you could click to open a menu containing your availability, settings etc.

In the upper left, above all your teams, you had the search bar.

In the new design, at least as of this writing, a combined search and command bar has been moved to the top bar and centered, while the profile and availability has been placed in the top right corner, similar to the rest of the Office 365 apps.

If you place the mouse cursor in the search area the help text gives you a clear indication that you now have new options for commands, using either / or @.

/commands

Let’s first explore the /commands.

As you can see, there are 17 /commands for a range of actions, with a nice help text on the right.

Typing /files gives you a list of recent files which you can narrow down by adding a searh phrase. Clicking a file will open it within Teams, with the usual Edit button in the upper right corner.

/goto will similarly give you a list of teams and channels, to get you quickly in the right direction.

I particularly like the /whatsnew command, which will give you the release notes. Not quite up to date (at least not in my tenant), but nevertheless a nice place to get an overview of the latest features.

/available, /away, /busy and /dnd (do not disturb) is a fast way to set your availability.

@commands

What about @commands/app commands?

Typing @ in the combined search and command bar will give you options like @Images, @News or @Weather, as well as a shortcut to reach the store.

Choosing one of them for the first time will allow you to install and add the app to a team with a few options.

Once installed you need to pick a channel, and you’re good to go.

Clicking an article will open a summary, while clicking the summary opens the original site in the browser.

You can also include information from these apps, or supported partner apps found in the store, directly in chat or conversations. That means there is no need to customize and insert a screenshot or paste in a link!

I added YouTube to a channel, let’s see what we can do:

@mention the app just like you would any user, channel, team etc.

A menu pops up with the available options for the app in question.

Insert a search phrase and the app will present a list of popular videos.

Pick a video and it will be inserted into the chat or conversation, where you can continue editing the message to suit your needs.

For more information, make sure to check out the Office blogs.

Quick reply

Last but not least, let’s not forget this long awaited little timesaver; the quick reply box within the chat notification!

Whenever someone send you a chat message while you’re not already in the chat itself, you get a popup right above the Windows system tray.

If you hit reply, a quick reply field opens up and lets you answer, well… quickly.

That’s all the news I have for you at this time, if you have any questions please use the comments below, or find me on Twitter (link on top of this page).