We are continuing our series of tool updates.  If you missed our previous post, click here and here. As a Microsoft district, I am focusing on Microsoft tools and Teams is up next.

Teams, as a tool, was integral during our Remote learning time but it had some growing pains. I think sometimes Microsoft rushes tools out there for Education (EDU). Teams were originally created pre-remote learning for businesses to have a place to collaborate. While we had access to it prior to remote learning, we were just getting to learn how to use it.

As we moved through the last two years, we’ve watched Teams continually improve. Now that we are back fully in person, you might be asking, “Why should I use Teams? It doesn’t do everything that Schoology does.” While it is true that Schoology does a lot more than Teams, Teams still has its place in our classrooms. Which is where our top updates to Teams focus.

Reflect

Reflect is a tool that helps foster social emotional learning in your class. Reflect can be set up as a featured tab inside of your class team.

This tool promotes:

• Self-Awareness & Empathy
• Increase Emotional Vocabulary
• Identify & Navigate Your Emotions
• Develop Growth Mindset & Confidence

Using Reflect encourages students to identify and express their emotions and reflect no pun intended…of course its intended. Anyone who says no pun intended isn’t being truthful to you. by entering in their emotions through emojis and illustrated representations of emotion words.

As a teacher, you’ll get real-time data on how your students are doing and Reflect gives you the ability to address anything going on in the classroom. To learn more about this tool click here.

Reflect Updates

Now that you know a little about Reflect, let’s get into the updates!

• Custom Questions
  • They’ve added the ability to create your own questions. Previously you didn’t have the ability to create your own custom questions for the students to respond to. Microsoft is good at listening to feedback, and this was a big request.
• Together view
  • When you are in meetings, you can change your camera view to the together view. It’s quite a cool view. By using this view the whole class can see how everyone is feeling anonymously and it helps the students build empathy for their classmates by using these Feeling Monsters.

Reading Progress

This is a tool that was introduced last year. We will be doing a deeper dive with a lot more details in a future post. Here’s a quick recap of the tool:

Reading Progress is a really cool, free tool built into Teams that helps to support and track reading fluency with your students. Students record themselves reading a document and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)  scores them. Then you can check out the results.

The improvements made include:

• Challenging Words Assignment Improvements
  • Extend your students’ learning by taking advantage of the A.I.’s ability to figure out what words are challenging for them. The program will create a list of recommended words, along with challenge words and builds an assignment you can give your students.
• Selecting Multiple Words in Teacher Review
  • Previously, when you found errors in the Teacher Review, you could only select one word at a time to fix. Now, if there are multiple words that belong in a different error category you can change them all at once.
• Timed Passages
  • Before this update, when a student was using timed reading, if they didn’t get to a word in the allotted time, it would be marked as an omission.  Teachers would have to manually go in and fix this. The update now only counts words per minute and accuracy by what was actually read in the time that it was read. If a student runs out of time, and still has words left, those words won’t be counted against them.

Reading Coach

Since the launch of Reading Progress, Microsoft’s next step was to develop a tool to extend independent practice, enter Reading Coach. Reading coach builds on the results of Reading Progress to create assignments and chances for students to practice the parts that were difficult. As the teacher, you can choose what tools are available to the students. In the future, Microsoft plans on having Reading Coach integrated into Immersive Reader.

Class Home Page

Currently, if you create a Teams class it will not have a home page. With the newest update, you can create a SharePoint like site as the home page for the students. The overall look is cleaner and organizable. There will no longer be a running chat. You’ll be able to list assignments, schedule, quick links to resources and of course use images.

Every couple of years Microsoft attempts to create an LMS with the tools that they have. This is by far their best attempt. It’s still not close to Schoology, Canvas or Brightspace in its abilities.  Nonetheless, it’s available for those who want to use it.

Whiteboard

Finally, the last update we’ll be discussing is the improvements to Whiteboard. In rapid fire fashion, Whiteboard has updated:

•  Editing and Navigation Tools (in particular the Zoom feature)
• Bing Search Improvements
• Whiteboard Together (easier to share and collaborate with students)
• Whiteboard Access outside of tenant (network)
• More Templates (don’t recreate the wheel)

There are so many more updates that I didn’t include. If you’re interested in seeing all of them, check out the links for June & August to get the full scoop! If there is something you are excited about and looking forward to using, let us know in the comments below or in our Yammer channel! Next week we’re doing a deep dive into Reading Progress.