Features of Microsoft Teams that make it an excellent option for online education. Back

Students, professors, and educators have been working hard over the past few years to facilitate the shift to remote learning. Their difficulties and learnings from the last year will guide how they run the following academic year, whether it is entirely online or a combination of in-person and online learning. We must give instructors the greatest resources for every option because different hybrid models may be used by different schools and systems.

We're thrilled to introduce a series of new features made to make remote learning more interesting, inclusive, and ultimately more human, using Microsoft Teams as the center for teaching and learning.

The developments made today go beyond merely allowing professors and students to see and engage with one another, even if this is an essential component of remote learning. They introduce different viewpoints intended to enhance connections and encourage more organic discourse.

Together Mode fosters a more engaged and connected online learning environment by placing all participants in a common setting, such as a college lecture hall. Its distinctive appearance and feel promote participation and make it simpler to pay attention to nonverbal signs and body language. Additionally, it helps to lessen outside distractions and bring attention back to those speaking, which is crucial in a classroom atmosphere.

To make managing the view more fluid, adaptable, and intelligent, Dynamic View prioritizes shared content and videos and employs AI to optimize the virtual classroom environment. Additionally, there are settings that allow pupils to customize the view to meet their individual needs or tastes. The Microsoft Whiteboard for Education upgrade also improves collaboration chances in the classroom. Sticky notes, pen and ink, and drag-and-drop functionality are features.

Chat Bubbles is an additional new element that will improve the remote learning experience. Although it can be a fun approach to engage students and promote idea sharing, talking during class can sometimes be a distraction. It is unnecessary to launch a separate chat window when using Chat Bubbles because messages will float up from the bottom of the screen for everyone and make the chat more prominent in the conversation.

Speaking of participation, anyone in a Teams class can choose an emoji and share it with the group using Live Reactions. This is a terrific approach to collecting immediate feedback from students and may be used by teachers to monitor comprehension, assess emotional health, and promote involvement. By developing check-in questions and polls, Reflect Messaging gives teachers another tool to support social and emotional connections with their pupils. As social cues are more difficult to pick up in hybrid or distant learning situations, this can be very helpful.

Microsoft Teams currently provide live captions and transcripts to help learners of all levels, and now we're introducing Speaker Attribution, which will add speakers' identities to captions. Students can download and store a complete transcript of the sessions after a class, complete with a list of who said what. We've also raised the cap on students in a class to accommodate classes that fill the biggest lecture halls on campus. Teams will be able to accommodate 1,000 attendees in a single meeting with complete audio, video, and chat interaction capabilities.

While the details of the upcoming school year are unknown, it is obvious that technology will continue to be used by instructors and students to support remote and hybrid learning approaches.