With summer around the corner, there are plenty of exciting things to look forward to in the months ahead. In fact, now through August, we are rolling out dozens of new Microsoft Teams updates and features that will give you more tools to engage your classrooms, connect with students, and inspire their success—in any learning environment.
Let’s dive in!
Spot engagement trends while on-the-go with Education Insights on mobile
You’re on the move and soon, Education Insights will be too! Starting in July, you will be able to view engagement Spotlight cards in Insights on your phone. Just open class Insights in the Teams app to see key stories pulled from engagement data. From there, you can identify trends and take action, for example, messaging an inactive student to ask if they need additional help.
Bring lessons to life with new Whiteboard features
Whether brainstorming on the fly or creating a rich and interactive lesson, Whiteboard—built directly into Teams—will offer more ways to add fun and engaging content to class materials. Coming in late August, educators and students can use annotation features to add digital ink, highlighters, stickers, sticky notes, and text boxes for special emphasis. For a more guided experience, you can lock your students’ view so that they only see what you see.
Easily sync grades to your Student Information System
There are only so many hours in a day—so why spend any copying and pasting grades? With Grade Sync, you can save time by automatically sending grades you enter to your Student Information System (SIS) gradebook. Syncing is currently supported for verified providers, including Aequitas, eSchoolData, Infinite Campus, PowerSchool, and Skyward with additional syncing support coming soon for Aeries, Synergy, and SIMS.
Save time and stay organized with simplified navigation
We heard from many of you that you would prefer to access Assignments, Grades, OneNote Class Notebook, and Insights from any channel within a class team— and that is exactly what the updated navigation will allow you to do! In August, changes to the new class team layout will be available for all educators and students using Teams’ grid view.
Inspire collaboration with Group Assignments
Soon, students will be able to better to create, collaborate on, and submit team assignments with the new Group Assignments feature. The feature, rolling out at the end of August, allows educators to assign credit and give comments to individual students and the whole group.
These are just a few of the exciting features coming to Teams now through August! If you haven’t already, sign up to get started with Teams for free today.
