Where to begin, as you know we love Microsoft here in Springfield and they have so many updates I will do my best to keep it short and to the point and I’ll include a video from What’s New in EDU that delves more into some of these updates. Also, I should mention that I have been selected to be a Microsoft Innovate Educator Expert, so I am even more excited!

One of the best things about going to ISTE is seeing first hand all about the updates and improvements and new tools coming to EDU. 

One of my favorite and newsworthy tools to come out of ISTE and that is the Presenter Coach in PowerPoint. The goal behind this tool is to help students and adults become better presenters based on the PowerPoint. One of the cool features of the coach is that it uses AI to help you improve your public speaking with monitoring if you are reading the slides, using um or uh, and concise language. Once you are done with the presentation, you will get a printout report of how you did. The nice thing is, since this is through PowerPoint online, which you have to log into, the AI gets better as you are using it. Also, for presentations, if you are using PowerPoint you can include captions for the presentations, which it can record, and you can save them to distribute later. 

Flipgrid made a few huge announcements including the fact that all videos are now transcribed, and students have the ability to use an Immersive Reader within the program. This tool can be a game changer for creative projects. Check out a future post all about Flipgrid!

Microsoft has partnered with NASA to design amazing lessons for hacking STEM. These lessons live on Microsoft and they have even worked with Carolina to create classroom kits for projects. There are 8 new lesson plans available here.  

Minecraft for Education added immersive reader to make it more accessible for all learners. They have also added several lessons including kits to help new teachers and new to Minecraft users use it in the classroom. There are also updates to the Sign-on process to make it easier and faster. In the curriculum realm of Minecraft for Education, Makerspace partnered with WWF to create a new interactive, standards-aligned lesson package called Extinction! A Biodiversity Crisis.

The education center on Microsoft has been updated, and they have added even more content. The PD is all FREE too! Lessons and badges on using Teams, Skype in the Classroom, Minecraft in EDU, the best tool of all Immersive Reader and so much more!

Microsoft also created You Can in :90 videos which are quick 90 second videos that you can watch to learn how to do some of the most commonly requested tips for using Microsoft Education tools. Here are two of my favorites

There are many more updates that we aren’t even touching here with Word, OneNote, PowerPoint, Sway and Excel. To learn all about them, you should follow Microsoft and Microsoft EDU on Twitter to say up-to-date.

What are some of your favorite updates connected to Microsoft? Leave you answer in the comments below!