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.

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.