Definitely teachers are the frontlines for enabling this sudden move from school to remote learning. Within a few weeks the teachers had to totally adapt the online learning for teaching their students. This is an incredible change and it has shown how committed and passionate the teachers are.
Technology has been a great helper to motivate remote learning and Microsoft Teams have come out with some of the most helpful methods that totally help both the students and teachers for collaborating and communicating while remote learning.
In this article we have included some ways to help you for learning that how you can use the Microsoft Teams for teaching your students in a better way. But before that we need to understand what is Microsoft teams and how does it works.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is basically a chat based collaboration tool which helps the remote workers by providing them the ability to work together besides sharing the information within a common space. It is a great tool for the Teachers as they are able to perform all the necessary functions for their pedagogy that they would have done while present physically in the school and they would have actually been able to provide at the time of school hours. It includes providing lectures, giving notes, taking assignments and explaining the lessons. All this can be done through the video calls and voice calls and the tools that help to coordinate meetings and carry out proper messaging. Additionally Microsoft teams are able to connect with the Microsoft Office 365 and several other critical and essential tools.
If you use Microsoft Teams you will be able to connect with your students in a fantastic way for collaborating creatively even from your remote location and you should be knowing that you can share the information in a secure way through this communication hub.
How to access Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft teams can be directly accessed from the browser of your laptop or desktop by heading to the URL of Microsoft or you can even download the desktop app as well. Microsoft Teams app can also be installed on your Android device or ioS. However, it is very much significant to understand that your Microsoft Teams browser app does not have the same functionality as that of desktop app stuff. The desktop app is much better and has several helpful tools which are easily accessible. But once you sign in from your browser you would get several options for downloading the app on your desktop. Then you can sign up for free for which you need to create a Microsoft account and once you get your account you can login to the Microsoft Teams and then you would be automatically directed to the office work space.
Ways for using Microsoft Teams for teaching in a hassle-free way:
1. Inclusion: We understand that in a class there are students of different learning abilities and all of the students have their own pace of grasping things into their minds. For ensuring that all the students having different learning abilities get included in your teaching pedagogy you need to include some technologies and tools which will be improving your teaching methods. Yes, sometimes understanding those tools from various apps for improving the pedagogy and to foster an overall inclusive classroom becomes a bit difficult.
But the Microsoft Teams comes with some built-in capability like that of message translation and immersive reader which are a great help for every student to understand your teaching perfectly. Also they have live captions option for meeting which helps the students to follow up every sentence and that is why Microsoft Teams has emerged to be a non stigmatizing platform.
2. Collaborating and Connecting : You can also use the Microsoft Teams for inculcating the built-in meeting features in order to effectively carry out your classes for classroom meetings. You can share the documents to your students by using Microsoft teams during your class which would be much more helpful for the students.
The virtual whiteboards also help the teacher for collaboration. There are teaching methods which can be properly delivered to the students. There are several options like notes, files, assignment conversations and video calls which can all together be a perfect learning method for your collaborative classroom and it can be done only by using Microsoft teams. Even the Microsoft teams have new updates which are rolling out time to time with better improvements after it has been inspired by some educators.
3. Using the inbuilt Staff Teams: In order to save time, the teachers need to be more organized besides collaborating in an effective way during the remote learning sessions. Microsoft Teams being a help for the educators includes a code part of their system which is a built-in Staff Teams that helps the Professional Learning Community (PLC) teams to go side by side with the class teams. This is actually a one stop shop for every educator. The Professional Learning Community along with the Staff Teams helps the educators and staff for easily communicating and collaborating during the time of remote learning sessions. Several schools are emphasizing their teachers for using this application for professional learning community teams and staff details in order to make things easier.
4. Providing feedback by using the built in rubrics: Good teaching practice is very much significant during this time of remote learning. The inbuilt rubrics of the Microsoft Teams assignments comes handy during this time of pandemic learning. The grading system of rubric helps to increase the transparency of assignment for the students and it also allows the Teachers for providing more insightful feedback. The mechanisms of feedback not only help every student for improving and learning their lessons but it also provides a transparent and consistent way to the Teachers for providing their grade. Indeed it has become an incredible and popular feature for both the students and educators in the Microsoft Teams.
5. Using the OneNote Class Notebooks within the Microsoft Teams: Being a multifaceted note taking tool, OneNote is a helpful tool which is built in the Microsoft teams and can be completely used for providing a variety of lessons and even some hands-on activities. By using the OneNote class notebooks provided by Microsoft Teams you as a teacher can provide a personal workspace to your pedagogy students besides giving out a content library for the handouts.
It can also be used as a collaboration space for your lessons and the creative activities also. It is also infused with various types of interactive apps which you can use on the one note page. There are even some interactive contents and lessons which are very much helpful especially for remote learning. We know that in the online learning sessions paper notes and handouts are pretty difficult to work with for which using a digital notebook for your class can be a perfect and natural fit.
Since remote learning has been a part of life for the Teachers and definitely the teachers using the Microsoft Teams are grateful for their creativity and so are we for the patience and diligence of the educator's present all over the world during this pandemic time.
References:
https://teachers.tech/how-to-use-microsoft-teams/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/remote-learning-edu