Technology advancements are now accelerating faster than our ability to adapt, leaving a huge gap in digital skills. A recent Microsoft study has revealed that 82 percent of UK jobs already require digital skills, and that 69 percent of leaders feel their organisation suffers from a digital skills gap, even though 59 percent of employees believe in the importance of developing their digital skills.

The skills gap is only getting wider. By 2025, there are expected to be three million new tech jobs in the UK, and 60 percent of employers are expecting their reliance on advanced digital skills to grow in the next five years. In effect, organisations hoping to grow and remain competitive in the future need to build a workforce that is equipped to fill these roles and thrive in a digital world of work.

Yet many employees don’t have the skills they need to perform their role currently, let alone in the future.

Demand for digital skills also goes beyond the technology sector. A recent employer survey by the Learning and Work Institute found that the proportion of employers who saw basic digital skills as important for employees was particularly high in certain sectors – including media, marketing, advertising and PR (100 percent), IT and telecoms (99 percent), and finance and accounting (97 percent).

However, even in the industry with the lowest proportion – manufacturing – nearly nine in ten (87 percent) employers said that basic digital skills were important for their workers.

So, what more can businesses and employers do to ensure that we have a steady supply of tech talent joining the sector? And, importantly, how can Microsoft help?

Introducing the Microsoft Connector Community

Whilst many business leaders recognise that their organisation is facing a skills shortage, the challenge often comes in knowing what to do about it.

At Microsoft, we believe that part of the answer to tackling the UK’s digital skills gap is collaboration. Bringing together organisations from across the public and private sector to work collectively and deliver tangible benefits to the prospective careers of young people, while driving growth and innovation across the economy.

The Microsoft Connector Community, part of the Microsoft Apprenticeship Connector, is designed to bridge the digital skills gap. It nurtures a connected community of businesses and organisations that collectively leverage their brands, reputations and resources to address the need for digital skills in the workforce and connect talented individuals to opportunities.

We believe that taking a collaborative approach ensures a steady and well-equipped technology talent pipeline. This is essential to addressing the skills shortages faced by employers today, as well as mitigating future shortages.

I’d like to share my thoughts on how this could work:

1. Creating a connected talent ecosystem: When employers work together to support, empower and inspire young people, rather than bombarding them with too many competing options, we all benefit. By using the Microsoft Apprenticeship Connector to advertise digital vacancies, digital skills bootcamps and opportunities for learning and training, we can create a highly visible and inspiring platform that enables young people to find the opportunities that are right for them. In addition, by pooling vacancies across one platform, with a single access point for roles, we can recycle and share talent. We can also signpost applicants towards other vacancies and employers, even if they have been unsuccessful in applying to a different company.

2. Simplifying the talent pipeline: We can help simplify the technology talent pipeline by reimagining how we advertise digital vacancies and training opportunities. For example, we can reach a larger and more diverse pool of candidates by simplifying the language that we use across our digital vacancies. This might increase engagement with candidates from non-conventional technology and digital backgrounds – allowing us to widen our talent pool and employ people who bring a unique and diverse perspective to the sector.

3. Leveraging expertise and insight: A coalition of like-minded individuals enables us to learn from one another’s expertise and experience, helping us to identify, profile and address the systemic issues that are stifling the UK’s economy. What’s more, the Apprenticeship Connector can also support business leaders and employers to better understand the social impact of the work that they’re doing. With demographic and geographic insight, we can identify and better target under-represented and under-served groups.

Building a Connector Community in Greater Manchester

As part of Microsoft’s UK Get On commitment, we’re committed to helping 30,000 people find jobs in the technology sector in Greater Manchester.

I recently had the pleasure of joining colleagues in the region for an event focused on building a connected talent system, as part of National Apprenticeship Week. After the event, I caught up with Greater Manchester Regional Lead, Marie Hamilton, for her take on how the introduction of Microsoft Connector Community could empower the next stage of the Get On campaign in Greater Manchester, and across the UK. Marie said:

“Greater Manchester is now the fastest growing technology hub in Europe, but to maintain this growth, we need to build a skilled and sustainable digital workforce. Working collectively across sectors and industries, regionally and nationally, allows us to understand and measure the skills gap, as well as enabling us to build a shared plan to tackle it.

Our National Apprenticeship Week event demonstrated huge enthusiasm for using the Connector Community model to further the progress made by Get On – as shown by the attendance from not only our largest private sector customers but also across the public sector, academia, central and local government”.

Marie Hamilton, Greater Manchester Regional Lead

What’s next?

Over the coming months, Microsoft will be holding a series of regional roundtable events to help businesses and organisations understand more about the Microsoft Apprenticeship Connector, and the Connector Community.

To find out more, please visit the Microsoft Apprenticeship Connector platform.

Microsoft Get On

At Microsoft, we believe everyone deserves access to the skills, knowledge and opportunity needed to achieve more. Through our Get On commitment, we’re helping 1.5 million people build tech careers and connecting 300,000 to tech job opportunities.

You can find out more by visiting our Digital Skills Hub, where you’ll find a host of information and resources designed to provide business leaders and employers with insights on how to close the UK’s skills gap, harness new technology and drive innovation.

You can also explore Microsoft Learn, which has an array of certifications, modules and learning pathways designed to help business leaders to upskill employees, as well as supporting individuals to take control of their careers and build vital digital skills.

Find out more

Microsoft Digital Skills Hub

Microsoft Apprenticeship Network

How Microsoft is connecting jobseekers to employers

About the author

I am the UK Apprentice Lead for Microsoft in the HR team. Working with apprenticeships since 2012, I have also worked with SMEs creating, designing, and delivering large corporate apprenticeship programmes. My role at Microsoft is all about creating and developing an apprenticeship strategy that supports our UK business and delivers an exceptional experience for both our apprentices and our business.

The post New connections: how we’re bridging the UK digital skills gap appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

We get some regular questions from teachers and IT teams that we have summarised below, plus you can get more tips in our Keeping students safe while using Teams for distance learning guide.

1. How do I manage access to my Channel meeting?
2. How do I stop others joining my online lessons?
3. How do I mute my students during a lesson?
4. How do I remove someone from a meeting?
5. How do I get approved external people to join my meetings or classes?
6. How can I download an attendance list?
7. How do I manage my meeting?
8. How do I let a student present during an online class?
9. How do I record my class?
10. As an IT admin, how can I get a policy guide?
    

1. How do I manage access to my Channel meeting?

You can make changes to your meetings via the Meeting options button. There are three ways to do this for scheduled meetings:

• In Teams, go to Calendar, select a meeting, and then Meeting options.
• In a meeting invitation, select Meeting options.
• During a meeting, select Show participants in the meeting controls. Then, above the list of participants, choose Manage permissions.

We recommend you set up the lobby option, to help manage the next often-asked question.

2. How do I stop others joining my online lessons?

Using the lobby and the features around joining meetings with students is the best way to stop unauthorised people joining online lessons. The lobby can be enforced at an administrator level and or through individual meetings.

By requiring participants to sign into Teams before they join a meeting, you can recognise who is joining the meeting and if they should be allowed.

Staff can also control chat settings as they need to. You can control the chat settings in channel meetings, including blocking, deleting and muting.

To block, navigate to the channel thread for your meeting. Select the Format button and change Everyone can reply to You and moderators can reply.

To delete messages, you can right-click and delete the messages. Your IT administrator needs to grant you the correct permissions to do this.

If a student is disruptive or behaving inappropriately in class conversations, you can mute them. To do this, Select More Options on your Team’s tile, the Manage team. Select the Members tab, then select the checkmark box under Mute Students.

3. How do I mute my students during a lesson?

Let students know that you’re muting their audio, then from the participants list, click Mute all.

To prevent students from unmuting, select More options next to Participants > Don’t allow attendees to unmute.

4. How do I remove someone from a meeting?

Make sure you have set up the lobby feature. By doing this, you can admit only the staff and students who are supposed to be in the lesson. If you have another teacher or teaching assistant in the class, make them a presenter. They can monitor and admit students who joined late.

If a participant is accidentally admitted to the meeting or is being disruptive, you can remove them from the meeting by clicking Show participants in the call controls, right clicking on the participant, and selecting Remove participant.

Make sure you have set your lobby controls on to ensure they cannot re-join the meeting without entering the lobby first.

5. How do I get approved external people to join my meetings or classes?

There are two ways you can allow users from other organisations: external access and guest access.

External access

External users have no access to your organisation’s teams or teams resources, but they can find, call, chat, and set up meetings with you. External access is turned on by default, but your IT team may have updated the settings. To make sure external users can join your meetings and classes, you’ll need to ask IT to manage external access.

Guest access

This allows an individual user to join a team with nearly all the same capabilities as a native team member. They can chat, call, meet, and collaborate on organisation files. A guest user can be given nearly all the same Teams capabilities as a native team member. Again, you’ll have to ask IT to enable guest access in Teams.

6. How can I download an attendance list?

You may want to track student’s attendance in online classes. An easy way to do this is by downloading a meeting attendance report. Firstly, make sure your IT team have turned it on. They can do this via Manage meeting policies in Teams. Then you can download the attendance list from the Participants pane of the meeting, by clicking the download arrow.

7. How do I manage my meeting?

Once you’ve managed your meeting options and started class, you can do a range of things within the meeting to make your class more interactive and fun.

Change class view

You and your students can change the class view. You can do this in More options, and choose from:

Gallery

The default view. Useful for small meetings or breakout rooms.

Large Gallery

Allows you to see the entire class. Shows up to 49 attendees.

Together mode

Useful for reducing meeting fatigue, Together Mode is good for large discussion groups.

Spotlight mode

Spotlight mode puts the teacher on everyone’s screens, so it’s useful when you need everyone’s attention. Only teachers can turn this on and it will stay until you turn it off. To do this, click Show Participants then More Options. In the menu, choose Spotlight me.

Set up breakout rooms

Breakout rooms are great for facilitating smaller discussions. Only the organiser will be able to set these. In the meeting controls, select Breakout Rooms.

From there, you can select the number of rooms, and number of users per rooms. You can choose to assign users automatically or manually.

You can see more meeting options in our reference guide.

8. How do I let a student present during an online class?

If a student needs to present content during a meeting, you can promote an attendee to presenter during the meeting. To do this, open the Participants pane, then Manage permissions. In Meeting Options, you can update the Who can present option. You can also manually select attendees by right clicking on their name and selecting Make a presenter. You can turn them back into attendees the same way once they are done.

9. How do I record my class?

You can record classes to share with students who are away, or for them to review later. To do this follow these steps:

1. Click on More options
2. Press Start recording. This will notify everyone that the recording has started.
3. To stop recording, go to More options and select Stop recording.
4. Once the recording is processed, it’s saved on Microsoft Stream.

Once the recording is ready, you can watch it in the char or select the More Options icon to watch it on Microsoft Stream where you can enable closed captions and search the meeting transcript. You can also share the lesson with others.

10. As an IT admin, how can I get a policy guide?

The Microsoft Teams for Education Policy Wizard simplifies policy management for your students and educators. You can quickly apply the most important set of policies to create a safe and productive hybrid learning experience.

Discover the Policy Wizard.

Hybrid learning resources for educators

• Getting started with Teams
• Learn how to use meetings
• Build accessible lessons

Hybrid learning resources for parents

• Getting started with Teams
• Parent’s guides to meetings
• Discover accessibility tips

Find out more

Join a training event

Visit the UK Hybrid Learning Hub

Download the hybrid learning guide: Keeping students safe while using Teams for distance learning

Read more education blogs for hybrid learning tips and best practices 

About the author

Alan has been involved in education for over 20 years, both in the classroom and as a senior leader. He moved to work for Microsoft to share best practice and empower staff and students to embrace the ever-changing digital world.

Alan thrives on helping both individuals and organisations realise the value of what they already have and how to help everyone save time through technology.

The post How to deliver safe and productive hybrid learning for students appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Following our simulated hospital event at UCLan in May 2020, I built a selection of chatbots using Power Apps. These were developed with the primary purpose of increasing fidelity within online simulation for our health and social care students. I wanted to explore how to automate and standardise parts of the simulation, to help with quality and control from the facilitator’s perspective.

Creating and developing a chatbot

To create a chatbot, I used Power Apps. I first selected Create under the left hand Chatbots heading, and then worked on developing the language behind the bot.

To get started I’d recommend using Microsoft Whiteboard or some paper to map out the language according to what you want the bot to ask and respond with. Try to draw on the direction of the conversation, and how you want it to start and end. Spend some time exploring existing tutorials found in Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, Azure, and LinkedIn Learning.

If you’re not sure where the bot will be deployed just yet, consider starting in Power Apps. This will make it possible to save it and then ‘sideload’ into a Team, or to embed the bot into another web site or resource. Follow the Microsoft Power Apps Community for Q&A and problem solving tips to help you along the way. 

Once created, you can proceed to Publish the chatbot, following any further instructions.

Taking a student-centric approach

It’s also important to consider the different types of chatbot that can be created when looking to develop your own. In our case, this helped shape how the bots would be used and where they would ultimately be deployed. Here are three different types of chatbots and examples of how we have used them at UCLan.

1- Repetitive prompter chatbot

Within one online OSCE for our MSc Occupational Therapy students, there are four tasks. The elements of each task became the most asked question, both across the module and leading up to the OSCE. Students understood the tasks but often couldn’t retain which order they were in, and whether these were live or recorded. I created a ‘repetitive prompter’ style chatbot for the module, and we have had real success embedding and deploying it within the assessment space. This is quite an exciting development for me, as it reinforces the benefits of investing in time in chatbots – particularly due to the potential of them being embedded within other Virtual Learning Environments. You can also lift this type of chatbot and place it within your Microsoft Teams space.

2- Reflective prompter chatbot

Our debrief chatbot for IPE online simulation was a collaboration between my colleague Abhi and I. Abhi came up with the language for the chatbot, and I then programmed and published it in Power Apps, using the demo link as a Website tab in Microsoft Teams. This was for a large-scale simulation, with 300+ people within three Teams environments on the one day. This was the first cross-faculty IPE event which had been run online whilst students were studying from home. Subsequent feedback from students and staff has since provided valuable insight into further development for future events. With growing interest in online simulation, we created a Team purely for staff to collaborate around simulation ideas. This has proved really useful, as the bots are now becoming shareable assets across our wider organisation.

3 – Role-specific chatbot

Development of role-specific chatbots started from reflections about how to part-automate online simulation, and also the possibility of deploying a series of chatbots within an online simulation to work as simulated characters within the Microsoft Teams environment. I created a couple of ‘patient’ chatbots, including ‘George’- who needs the toilet. If you don’t respond appropriately, he (understandably) becomes very angry, upset and intends on placing a complaint. I am currently developing another simulated hospital event for 2021 and intend for this to be an IPE activity.

Here is an example of a nurse chatbot which we deployed into a large-scale IPE simulation for a colleague.

Looking ahead

Having successfully deployed chatbots at a local level, we are now looking at the possibility of wider publishing to the organisations app catalogue in Microsoft Teams. Bots could then be selected by other users, and once deployed, would appear as 1:1 chats.

We have no doubt that 2021 and beyond will highlight an increased appetite in the part-automation of a number of day-to-day tasks undertaken by educators, and this is something we will continue to both explore and evaluate.

Find out more

Chatbots for TEL

Creating chatbots for online simulation

Power Apps

App Studio: Creating chatbots in Microsoft Teams

Power Virtual Agents

Learning Microsoft Power Apps

Read more education blogs 

About the author

Sam Pywell is a Lecturer in Occupational Therapy at the University of Central Lancashire, and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Sam has recently led development of chatbots in online simulation for health and social care students using Microsoft Teams. She is an MIE Expert, DigiLearn Champion and Key Contributor to the DigiLearn Sector community. You can follow her on Twitter @smileyfacehalo.

The post How to develop a chatbot to support your educators and students appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Exeter Cathedral School (ECS) was founded in 1179 as a choir school. Nowadays, the School is a co-educational day and boarding school which prides itself on being a nurturing and purposeful school for some 260 pupils. Earlier this year, after the Prime Minister’s announcement that schools across the country were required to close, the School’s management team met to prepare for remote learning for the first time in the School’s 841-year history. We agreed on a three-phase approach.

• Phase 1: Help pupils, parents and staff navigate the three remaining days of the term.
• Phase 2: Provide immediate and long-term on-site support for key worker families.
• Phase 3: Research, prepare and launch a home learning platform to allow for a longer-term closure.

As a small school, we are mindful of budgets and of the need to be able to develop and manage our remote learning platform in-house. All of our requirements led us to Microsoft and to Microsoft Teams. 16 days later, we launched our first ever virtual learning environment: ECS:Learning@Home.

8 principles to delivering a balanced approach to remote learning

Remote learning was new to us and to our pupils and families. We knew what we asked of them needed to be realistic, doable, worthwhile and stimulating. So, we established eight founding principles that would underpin ECS:Learning@Home.

Meaningful and manageable

We worked hard to set up programmes that allowed uncomplicated access to our curriculum across the age groups. We ensured that our online learning was rich, purposeful and clear.

Enriching

School is about much more than classroom learning. Through our home learning programme we were able to come together as a school for assemblies, form times, quizzes, sports days, guest speakers, Speech Day and more. This allowed us to add the important touches to a child’s day ‘at school’ and to create space for pupils to be recognised for their work and have fun with their peers.

Rigorous, balanced and flexible

We attach great importance to a broad and balanced school experience andwanted to make sure that our ‘real life’ breadth of opportunity and high standards continued to be offered remotely.

Equally, a one-size-fits-all approach was clearly not going to be good enough – each family’s circumstances were different. So we empowered pupils and parents to access our full daily offerings as they saw fit and to build in screen-free time to their routines.

Interaction

Interaction is absolutely fundamental for effective learning and teaching – and of course for first-rate pastoral care. We wanted to use a digital platform that could replicate, as closely as possible, a classroom experience. We were determined to be live, interactive, and reactive to pupils’ needs while online. Teams allowed us to do this and to achieve a coherent model of home learning and pastoral care across the school.

Creativity

And as a school which has its foundations in performance, music and spirituality, we wanted to continue to be a shining light for creativity. As well as daily wellbeing sessions run by our sports department, visual and performing arts featured heavily in our programme. Each afternoon our Creativity Hub opened up and gave our pupils access to lessons and activities in music, art and design and storytelling. We even launched ECS:Choristers@Home to keep our core strands of Choristership alive.

A day in the life of a pupil in remote learning

We streamlined the timetable so that busy families could easily keep track of the daily pattern. Every pupil started their day with live ‘morning welcome’ sessions with their form teacher and friends. This was the backbone of our online pastoral provision and allowed us to continue to be a school where people matter.

Supporting staff, parents and families

Staff training was integral to the success of remote learning. We ran training events to allow teachers to learn about Teams and provided time to practise in designated Training Huddles. All of this was, of course, done remotely! We also provided parents with a weekly evening training session.

We sent out a weekly ECS:Learning@Home update, complete with videos and snippets from the week, and – crucially – a ‘You Said, We Did’ feature: this gave parents and pupils a voice, and helped us to unify our efforts and build a cohesive home-school community committed to improvement.

Pupil and staff outcomes in remote learning

Using Teams allowed us to keep doing what we love – coming together each day as a school community. We genuinely stayed connected and, in amongst all of the learning, had a whole lot of fun!

As a staff body we held games and quizzes, kept the banter flowing through Teams chat, and even had a lipsync battle with senior pupils. Teams also meant that our pupils were able to take their public exams. In fact, the class of 2020 equalled the School’s best-ever public exam results.

The success of our ECS:Learning@Home programme seems to have resonated locally and more widely. We currently have more enquiries than ever before from families who want to explore an ECS place for their child.

How remote learning impacts our future plans

We have now adopted a blended-learning approach to our curriculum with the support of Teams, using it to further pupils’ independent learning skills. Live speakers are now joining us for assemblies and Enrichment Talks via Teams to speak about topical issues and our Pupil Voice initiative continues to thrive digitally.

We see our blended learning approach being integral to our provision over the coming months and years – it’s here to stay.

Find out more

Discover more about ECS’s journey

Get started with hybrid learning

Learn about remote learning

About the author

James Featherstone is the Headmaster of Exeter Cathedral School. His job is to lead and manage the School, look after the team of staff, and to make sure that the 260 pupils and their families have the best possible educational journey. Before joining ECS, James was on the Senior Leadership Team at the Perse School in Cambridge.

Outside of school James enjoys singing, travelling through France (he’s a linguist by training), and doing his best to keep up with his two children on their adventures together.

The post How to deliver a balanced approach to remote learning appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

More than ever, students are now accessing and engaging with learning through their own mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets. One of the main benefits of using podcasts, are that they don’t require the consumer of the content to be viewing a screen. This can often prove both flexible and convenient, particularly as the files can be listened to in a variety of settings – e.g. while out exercising, or even when relaxing in the evening.

So, the concept sounds great – but how do you actually create a podcast? This blog will take you through some key steps to creating your very first podcast, using many tools available within the Microsoft Office 365 suite.

1) Planning the content for the podcast

Before starting to record a podcast, there are some key factors to consider:

• • Who are the intended listeners?
  • How might they be accessing the content?
  • Are you recording ‘solo’, or wanting to capture a conversation with multiple participants?
  • What recording setup do you currently have?
  • Are you likely to require any further equipment?

Addressing these points will help ensure that you are prepared to record your first podcast.

2) Recording the podcast

The main hardware requirement for getting started with podcasting, would be either a smart phone, tablet, laptop or PC with a built-in microphone. A dedicated external microphone will likely enhance the quality of audio, but is not essential to the recording process. A set of earphones or headphones can also be useful for blocking out unwanted background noise during the recording process.

If you are simply looking to record ‘solo’, then you can use the Voice Recorder app built into Windows 10. This provides basic recording and editing features, and is one of the simplest ways of capturing audio content. Most modern mobile devices also come with their own built-in app, which will have a similar level of functionality.

However, if your aim is to capture a conversation between multiple participants e.g. between a host and several guests, then Microsoft Teams can offer a suitable solution.

Firstly, you will need to arrange a Microsoft Teams meeting to host the conversation, and then invite in any other participants. Once in the Teams meeting, you can select Start Recording by clicking ‘…’, which will begin recording any audio and video being shared by the participants. Once finished, you can follow a similar process to Stop Recording.

Although you are not likely to need any visuals for an audio podcast, it can be useful to have cameras switched on as a visual aid throughout the recording process. This really helps with making a virtual conversation feel much more natural – as participants can often benefit from seeing body language and visual cues.

3) Editing the content

It’s not always essential to edit a podcast. However, you may wish to tidy up your recording before publishing. If using Voice Recorder, this is possible within the application itself.

If you have recorded within a Microsoft Teams meeting, you can use the Trim video function within Microsoft Stream. If you want to retain the video captured within the podcast, then sharing as part of a Microsoft Stream channel (within your organisation), may prove a suitable option.

If you are wanting to extract just the audio from your recording (to be hosted elsewhere), or wish to do some additional editing, such as adding background music or adding an intro/outro – this will likely require the use of audio editing software. You could check with your organisation to see what software you might already have available to you. Audacity is a free open-source alternative, which provides plenty of functionality for anyone looking to get started with audio editing.

4) Hosting the final podcast

Once you have recorded and edited your podcast, your next consideration is where to host it. There are many ways that you can host a podcast online. One way of doing this via your Office 365 account, would be to use Microsoft Sway. Sway is described as Microsoft’s digital storytelling tool, and allows great flexibility to embed different types of multimedia content – including audio. Here are a few simple steps to get started with your podcast in Microsoft Sway:

1. 1. Select Create New
   2. Source a suitable image to use as cover art, and Insert as an Image Card
   3. Set the image Emphasis, as appropriate
   4. Create an Audio Card, and upload the relevant audio file
   5. Add any additional info (episode no., topic, guests etc) into the Caption box
   6. Use the Group function to link both the Image and Audio

These steps can easily be repeated to add further podcast episodes within the same Sway.

Using the Styles option within Design, will also allow you to customise the way that your Sway looks and feels. Selecting the Slides navigation mode often provides a clear and simple way of navigating between individual podcast episodes.

The Play button will provide a preview of how your Sway looks, and once you are happy, you can click the Share button to obtain a shareable weblink. This can very easily be embedded within a Team, using the Website option when adding a new tab to a channel.

Putting the steps into practice

Our DigiLearn podcast might give you a bit of inspiration to support you on your own journey to creating and sharing podcasts with your students.

Below is a quote from Nicky Varley – an MIE Expert and Lecturer in Children’s Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire, who has started exploring the use of podcasts within her teaching.

“The podcast was recorded via Microsoft Teams and then uploaded to our Virtual Learning Environment for the students to listen to. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and they appreciated that we could share our stories within the podcast – something the students said they had really missed from the classroom. The trouble with no longer being face to face, is you miss that interaction with students, and sometimes online teaching can feel a little cold. Within nursing, sharing our past experiences really helps to paint a picture for our students. This is something I know I have really struggled to recreate with other forms of technology, but now podcasting seems to have changed that. By using this approach, not only are we being inclusive, we are also being creative.”

There are many different approaches to creating and hosting podcasts utilising many of the tools within Office 365, and we would encourage you to share any of your own innovative approaches with the wider #MicrosoftEDU community.

Find out more

How to use Voice Recorder

Recording a meeting in Teams

Create channels in Microsoft Stream

Digital storytelling with Microsoft Sway

Recording a podcast for accessible learning

About the author

Chris is a Senior Learning Technologist at the University of Central Lancashire, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Since 2018, he has led development of UCLan’s innovative and sector-endorsed DigiLearn model and programme – to support, recognise and reward colleagues in relation to their inclusive and innovative digital practice. Widening collaboration across the sector, Chris also co-ordinates UCLan’s DigiLearn Sector – an active community, connecting over 1000 digital practitioners across HE, FE, schools, and beyond. As a Microsoft Learning Consultant, he now works with other institutions – supporting their adoption of Microsoft technologies to improve both staff and student outcomes. Chris also makes regular appearances presenting at both national and international education conferences. You can follow him on Twitter @ChrisLearnTech.

The post New ways of learning: 4 steps to record and share a podcast with your students appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Sometimes, having a lesson plan is the easiest part and recorded and uploading the lesson can be daunting. But we’ve got a step-by-step guide on how to record, upload, and share your presentations.

We’ll be doing this through PowerPoint and Microsoft Stream, which makes it easy to use and accessible, with transcripts and captions.

Add narration and record your PowerPoint presentation

PowerPoint has a really great feature to help you easily develop new content by adding audio narration to existing slides. This can also prove really useful for students when recording assessed presentations.

Top tip: Presentation Coach helps you prepare in private to give more engaging presentations.

1. Setting up the Recording tab in PowerPoint

Before you can use the Recording feature, you will need to make sure it’s in your main ribbon in PowerPoint.

1. Go to File, then Options, choose the Customise Ribbon tab.
2. On the list on the left hand side, change Popular Commands to All Tabs and find the Recording tab. Press add and it will move to your Ribbon. Press OK.
3. On the main ribbon tab, go to Slide Show, and it should be there.

2. Recording audio narration over your slides

Once you have added the Recording tab, you can then use the Record Slide Show function. This will allow you to record audio and video, over each slide in the sequence. You can pause or stop at any time, and re-record any sections that you are not happy with.

3. Exporting your slides as a video

Once you’re happy with the audio-narrated slide content, you can then proceed with exporting it to a video. This can either be exported locally to an MP4 video file, or alternatively, published directly to your Microsoft Stream account when using Office 365.

Effectively sharing your virtual lesson on Stream

Once you have uploaded your presentation to Stream, you will want to share them with your learners. You also might want to share other videos with colleagues or learners. These could include Microsoft Teams Meeting recordings, or other content.

The great thing about Stream is it can autogenerate captions using Automatic Speech Recognition technology. These are also available as a transcript so users can look for specific points in the video later on.

Top tip: Make your lesson more engaging by adding a quiz using Microsoft Forms.

1.      Turn on captions on your video

If you’ve already uploaded a video, you can go to the Edit Video option. Otherwise, you can do this as you’re uploading a video. In the Details section, select your supported language.

On the Options tab, set Autogenerate captions to On.

It may take a while for the captions to generate – It typically takes 1-2 times the video’s duration. For example, a one hour video, could wait around two hours to finish processing.

2. Sharing an individual virtual lesson in Microsoft Stream

Once signed-in to Microsoft Stream, your video content can be found under My Content. Individual videos can be shared easily via web-link, email or embed code.

3. Curating and sharing a Channel of Stream video content

By creating a Channel in Stream, you can group related video content for easy access and viewing. This can prove particularly useful for curating collections of video-based learning resources.

4. Adding your virtual lesson to Microsoft Teams

As well as sharing your Videos and Channels using a link, email, or embed code – you can also embed content directly into Microsoft Teams. This helps maintain a streamlined experience for your learners, and ensures content is organised and accessible within the learning environment.

Creating engaging virtual lessons

By using PowerPoint and Stream, you can deliver engaging, accessible virtual lessons that you can share to your Class Teams, or share with learners and other educators. This will help create a fun, smooth learning experience for everyone, no matter where they are.

Find out more

Discover our remote learning resources

About the author

Chris is a Senior Learning Technologist at the University of Central Lancashire, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Since 2018, he has led development of UCLan’s innovative and sector endorsed DigiLearn model, to recognise and reward the inclusive digital practice of academic colleagues. Widening collaboration across the sector, Chris also co-ordinates UCLan’s DigiLearn Sector – a community fostered to connect digital practitioners from across HE, FE, schools, and beyond. As a Microsoft Learning Consultant, Chris now works with other institutions – supporting their adoption of Microsoft technologies, to improve both staff and student outcomes. He is also producer and co-host of the EdTech Talks podcast, and you can follow him on Twitter @ChrisLearnTech.

The post How to make engaging virtual lessons for students appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

So what we can do with machine learning? We can first use it to understand an individual’s learning needs. It can then be used to improve the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of teaching.

Using technology to disrupt education

Teachers often understand the complexity of their student’s parent’s lives (often, they’re in the same boat!). Especially when remote learning and extra support at home can generate real pressures. But parents are always keen to help. And they now have a greater awareness than ever of the array of remote learning options available. Machine learning can help take the complexity out of giving students the extra help they need, coupled with adaptive learning.

What is adaptive learning?

Adaptive learning uses software to change what is presented to a student based on their interactions. To the student, it may seem that they are being presented with content, questions, and hints that are either preordained or random. The reality is that the adaptive learning algorithms are carefully guiding their path. When adaptive learning is blended with effective teaching, students can master and retain skills 1.5 times faster.

Many have looked to build more effective systems, leveraging the power of cloud and the opportunities it gives for data processing and machine learning.

If I were a Hollywood scriptwriter, this is the point for a montage with screens full of numbers crunching away, automating the creation of an education system. Unfortunately, it is not that easy. It also, disappointingly, doesn’t involve a montage filled with techy or 80s music (I’ll let you choose that one).

Back to reality. Here are the four most important things we learnt when we implemented adaptive learning with machine learning:

1. Consider the human side of technology to keep students engaged

We all have different preferences of learning style, such as visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinaesthetic. A teacher will recognise this and will adapt their approach for individuals as appropriate, particularly where one encounters an area of difficulty. This, however can take a lot of time away from the teacher to deliver these different styles to each student. Machine learning can automatically deliver content to suit the learning preferences for individual students, freeing up time for teachers to spend supporting their students in other ways and answering any questions they might have. It can also help with employing gamification techniques to provide a fun and interactive learning experience for students.

2. Be clear on the outcomes you want to achieve and get your data in order

We wanted to use adaptive learning to help students master and retain skills as efficiently as possible. To help this, we gave our machine learning program a dataset of previous interactions. This enabled us to predicts future events based on that previous data.

The more the program is used by students and the more new data it collects, the smarter your machine learning system will be as it learns to adapt and provide outcomes that are closer to what you set out to achieve at the start.

3. Determine how and when to intervene

Reinforcement is used to ensure that students continue to be exposed to skills that have been mastered until they have demonstrated a solid understanding. To achieve this, there are a number of variables adaptive learning will use. This includes the order that skills are presented, when to progress or regress skills, and when and how to intervene if a student is becoming stuck.

4. Look for opportunities to understand and optimise

Using machine learning optimises the learning path by enabling you to use a far more complex set of variables. This could include the time taken for a student to answer a question, and the geographical location (and therefore school system and learning method taught). When given a wrong answer, machine learning can identify and reinforce the skill that was the source of the misunderstanding.

Doing this will help a student retain and learn skills quickly, as well as ensuring they are getting the right information, at the right time.

Unlock children’s learning potential

Online education tools are a great resource for parents. Machine learning, when applied intelligently to adaptive learning, has the ability to provide highly optimised support for accelerating children’s progress. However, this is not purely a numbers game. The human touch is a critical element in providing true long-term engagement and progression.

When assessing tools available, try and choose those that best support the power of adaptive learning with human intervention.

If you have an idea where you think machine learning may help and want to know more, we would love to spend the day with you discussing the art of the possible.

Find out more

Discover tools and technology for distance learning

Learn how to create and collect data through adaptive assessments 

Explore more about Talk Think Do

Explore Learning

Grow your skills and expertise at the UK Partner Skills Hub

About the author

Matt is CEO of Talk Think Do, a UK based Microsoft Gold Partner specialising in cloud native solutions. Before Talk Think Do, Matt amassed 25 years’ experience in software development, working on high profile projects for world-renowned organisations. Employed first as a developer and then as a solutions architect, Matt’s CV includes work for Barclays, Fitness First and several Formula 1 teams.

Today, his focus is on the direction of Talk Think Do, growing the business by developing strategic partnerships and building the technical capability of the team.

The post 4 steps to enhance children’s education with machine learning appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Teams is built with intelligent security by design. As it’s our one main online portal, once signed in, we can access everything we need. This means no longer do we have to remember multiple logins for different websites.

Getting time back to support teachers

As teachers, we often don’t give professional development the time it needs. I’m just as guilty as most when it comes to this! But we can use this technology to help us gain back valuable time to focus on our development and help our students achieve better learning outcomes as a result.

Ensuring all staff are sufficiently trained to utilise new technology is often a thought that raises questions for school leaders. We introduced Teams in training sessions for our teachers and support staff, using the following five steps.

1.      Share your vision

Firstly, you need to share your rationale on using Teams, and why it is important. Earning trust in this step will set you up for success down the line. We prepared Teams by putting current and relevant versions of the files and documents relating to teaching on Teams. For classroom support staff, have resources, information on pupils etc. on Teams.

Within our school Teams, we have set up different teams. For example, we have a whole staff Team and subject teams. You can control who can have access to different Teams within your school.

2.      Learn the basics

Once all our staff members had an understanding of Teams, we then talked to them about the basics, such as creating Channels. These can be created within the Team for topics, units, and more. They are where you share information and communicate with your team. We focussed on Posts, Chats and Files to show how staff how to get the best out of Teams, quickly.

Chat: You can send messages quickly and easily to individuals or groups. You can also make audio and video calls. During the school closure period this function has been crucial to keep communications. Not just meetings, but we have even had staff quiz nights over Teams for a bit of fun and to boost morale.

Posts: To me, posts are the virtual version of a staffroom noticeboard. They’re visible to everyone in the Team. This has been very helpful for myself and other members of staff to give key messages to everyone, and easily allows quick conversations and file sharing. In both Chat and Posts you can also attached documents, websites, pictures, video clips.

Files: You can upload and organise documents within the Files. These can be accessed, edited (both individually and collaboratively) by any member of staff, from any device, and any location. Because it automatically saves the latest version, there is no confusion about different versions of the same document. For us, we can regularly update documents such as our Childcare Provision register and staffing rota, and because these can be accessed on any device – everyone who needs to can still read and check these documents.

Within Teams you can also use a range of other Microsoft tools such as Forms, Sway, Flipgrid, and link to third party apps such as Wakelet and KaHoot.

3.      Add OneNote to your channel

All staff have their own OneNote Notebook, but we also have different sections and pages within these notebooks as a collaboration space, which everyone can access and add to. As a Headteacher, I now keep all of my notes on OneNote, so that I can access them at any point in the day. In our Senior Leadership Team, we are using OneNote to create agendas and take minutes from our conversations and meetings. This helps us prioritise our actions to stay on track and to collect ideas for training and future Strategic Development Priorities.

4.      Provide training and education

We introduced staff to the Microsoft Educator Center, which provides a wide range of on-demand courses and learning pathways, including for Teams. We asked staff to undertake the first two Microsoft Educator online course, which would help develop their understanding and use of Teams, and also give them MIE (Microsoft Innovator Educator) accreditation. These courses were: Transform Learning with Microsoft Teams and Getting started with OneNote. All of our staff did this and are really engaging with becoming a MIE.

5.      Assign them a task

To get teachers used to Teams, we asked them to upload all their planning from the school year and their mid-year reports by a certain time. We had already uploaded the latest data (both Core and Foundation curriculum) and the associated documents onto Teams, so we asked them to update these versions from now on, as this would enable easier access for them and other colleagues.

These first small steps have given our teachers confidence in using Teams. Not only does Teams make the classroom easier, but it helps our staff to communicate quickly. It also helps us store files safely, developed documents collaboratively, and is accessible anywhere, on any device.

Find out more

How to unlock anywhere learning by setting up a Teams Class

Join a Teams webinar

About the author

Tim is Headteacher at Cornerstone CE Primary in Hampshire. Part of his role is to support his team to continue to review, develop, and refine their approach to teaching inspiring engaging and meaningful learning experiences for students and teachers. He is passionate about professional development and networking, fascinated by teaching and learning, and driven by the needs of his pupils. You can follow him on Twitter here.

The post Five steps to introduce Teams to your educators appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

At Cornerstone Public School, we decided to implement Teams across the whole school to make it easier for students and teachers to access the information they need, when and wherever they are.

Having access to planning is a key aspect of teaching. In Teams, these documents can be accessed securely, while meeting GDPR guidelines.

Giving your students’ access to anywhere learning helps them gain confidence and digital skills, preparing them for their future.

It’s easy to set your class up on Teams. Normally, your IT team will have added your students to a class group and you can then add this to your Class Team. If not, add your student’s Office 365 Education names.

1.      Organise your class Team

Every team comes with a general channel, which has the following tabs: Posts, Files, Class Notebook, Assignments, and Grades. You can add more channels if you need to and set their privacy to be accessible to all students or just some.

2.      Communicate with your students

Use Posts to message your entire class or Channel – I tend to do this for news and to share information. The Announcements feature is great for when I need to draw student’s attention, for example to share an assignment. If you need to talk to a student or colleague one-to-one, you can use the chat function to send text messages, audio messages, and video or audio calls.

3.      Share and organise documents

You can upload, create, and share key documents for either pupils or the whole class to edit collaboratively. You can set files to read only when you need to use them as reference to complete assignments. The documents can be all stored securely in one place making it easy to find.

4.      Class Notebook

Class Notebook gives your students a place to take notes and collaborate with the class. A variety of media can be embedded within a page on a Notebook supporting students’ learning experiences. For group work, the collaboration space provides a space where groups can work together.

Assign students their own OneNote notebook. Splitting the notebook into different categories helps the work stay organised. Each section acts like its own book collating all the work that a student completes.

5.      Assignments and grades

This brings us to Assignments and Grades. You can set students assignments through Teams, either for the whole class or particular pupils depending on differentiation. You can even add the assignment instantly into a student’s particular section of their Class Notebook.

The Grades tab lets you track student progress and view the status of their work. You can grade individually via the Grades tab, or collectively through the Assignment tab, adding feedback and points.

Using Microsoft Teams, creates independence, particularly for students in the older years of primary school. With the majority of secondary schools using an online platform for learning, this prepares them for this experience, as well as their future in further education and the workplace.

Find out more

Five steps to introduce Teams to your educators

Join a Teams webinar

About the author

Henry is a digital leader and Year 6 teacher at Cornerstone Primary School and an MIEExpert. He is passionate about developing technology in the classroom and equipping students with the best skills to prepare them for the future.

The post How to unlock anywhere learning by setting up a Teams Class appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

We wanted to see if Teams would help facilitate a course with a remote study. We also wanted to build the digital skills and confidence of our future nurses.

Initially, we created a Teams space that included educational resources and guided study, in addition to interactive conversational feedback mechanisms. This allowed students to interact with both their tutor and peers. It also provided a sense of belonging to an online learning community – even though students were geographically separated.

Making connections no matter the distance

Students are engaged in weekly studies directed by the facilitator/tutor. In their own time and at their own pace, they immersed themselves in the resources provided via Teams. With a theme of learning and sharing, its helped students with module assessment group support and feedback following draft submissions to Teams.

Because Teams is accessible on all devices, students could access it no matter where they were. The tutor was the owner of the Team and governed access to the group, organising resources, and directing student study.

In an early poll using the built in Polly app, students were asked: “How are you finding using the Teams app so far?”

The results were:

29% ‘Loving it’

71% ‘Looks interesting’

The students embraced Teams reluctantly initially, but then having realised its benefits and flexibility, they became more impressed.

The six benefits of Teams

Here are six of the key features and benefits the students found using Teams:

1. The platform allowed direct discussion between individual students about practice which encouraged the theme of learning and sharing within the module of study.
2. It also allowed peer review and collaboration of posted work together with group supervision from the tutor to the whole group in relation to a piece of work or resource.
3. It was user friendly for the students, it’s portability meaning contributions might be posted any time, even in the middle of a night shift. It’s range of accessible-by-design features meant all students were able to use it.
4. As student expertise and competence with this digital platform grew, it promoted a virtual professional community of learners. They were able to connect and learn from each other despite their physical remoteness.
5. The portability of Teams meant that the collaborative space was encouraged and inadvertently this encouraged digital competence. Users could post their own work and also comment or like the work of others.
6. The private chat function could also be engaged by students if necessary, to speak privately with the tutor or other students.

Increased student outcomes

The flexibility of access to CPD programmes was enhanced. Users were able to access support from both tutor and peers. They were also able to review educational resources posted to the Team by the tutor/facilitator. This allowed an extension of the professional working environment, provided by a professional alternative to the many social media platforms that we now know.

The very nature of Teams promoted the development of professionally required characteristics such as integrity, leadership, respect, collaboration, and communication. It also helped develop the professionally recognised standards of behaviour as set out by the nursing code (NMC, 2019).

Ultimately, Teams facilitated the preservation of safe and effective clinical practice through the sharing of best evidence, the enhancement of knowledge, and the recognition of digital capability. Microsoft Teams has proved itself to be a valuable asset in the growing toolkit of digital resources that support education and learning, digital competence, and professional development.

Find out more

Leveraging Teams to develop transferable skills for the future work environment

9 ways to transform the student learning experience with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams adoption guide

About the author

Anne Jarvis is a Certified MIE, and Senior Lecturer in acute, critical & emergency care in the School of Sport & Health Sciences at UCLan. She teaches the key concepts and principles in relation to the management of the neuroscience patient including neuro-anatomy, physiology & patho-physiology. She has a particular interest in patient experience, and her publications include a paper that details her experience of using Microsoft Teams in education; Jarvis, A. Reflecting on technology-enabled learning in neuroscience nurse education. British Journal of Neuroscience Nursing. 2019, 15(4), 190-193.

The post 6 ways Microsoft Teams helps develop transferable skills in students appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.