Empower Education with Microsoft Collaborative Tools via Academic Software

Enhancing collaboration with Microsoft teams in education

In this article, Andreas Van Assche, Solutions Architect at Academic Software talks about how Microsoft 365 Education can be used to enhance teaching in the rapidly changing context of digital education.

Microsoft 365 Education provides teachers, students, and staff with the means to work collaboratively, and unleash their creativity in an inclusive, secure and simple-to-use solution, designed for everyone. Microsoft Office 365 Education includes Microsoft Teams, Office Online and OneDrive.

Microsoft Teams is a collaborative tool that is perfectly designed for teamwork in hybrid educational settings. Teams provides a virtual classroom where you can chat or take part in video conferences, where classwork can be assigned and assessed, where students can work as a whole class or in small groups, and where you can share files in a secure way.

Microsoft Teams is much more than a video conferencing platform as it integrates all your favourite teaching applications, including third party apps. It allows you to easily project your lessons and save time in managing assignments, correcting and exchanging them with your students, and much more.

Main features of Microsoft Teams

Assignments: distribute, monitor and mark assignments.

Screen sharing: share your screen or presentation in real time.

Immersive reader: easily read conversations and instant chats in a customised format.

Whiteboard: collaborate using an infinite digital drawing area.

Raising your hand: intervene without interrupting others.

Together mode: visualise the whole class in an innovative way for discussions and presentations.

Accessibility: enable subtitling, transcripts, American Sign Language visibility, and the Immersive Reader.

Integration: create customised learning experiences by integrating Microsoft Teams with your learning management system.

Insights function: get data on student engagement from an intuitive dashboard.

The Class teams option in Microsoft Teams is specifically designed for teaching and learning

Create or join a team to collaborate with a group of other educators or students. This allows you to discuss, share files and use common tools in a group, all in one place. This group can consist of a class of students and teachers, a team of staff and teachers collaborating on a particular topic, or even a group of students coming together for a club or other extra-curricular activities. You can add channels and manage groups, explore channels, write messages, share files, open assignments and notes to distribute assignments, comment on students' assignments and track their progress, and of course start a conversation (video conference) with the class.

Academic Software: simplifying licensing and deployment for Microsoft 365 Education

Academic Software can help you deploy and use Microsoft 365 Education in your educational institution, and we can do much more for you. We can ensure that 100% of the digital tools you and your students need are easily accessible, whenever and wherever they are needed, and on whatever device. Academic Software’s platform provides all of an institution’s software, cloud, web application, and learning platform needs, and simplifies the licensing and deployment of digital resources so that users can get on with teaching and learning!