As of today, you can now paste the URL of any Pin onto a OneNote page or a Word for web document and it will render it as a live interactive embed, similar to how we support embedding many apps into OneNote and Word for web.

OneNote

To see some examples or how easy this is to do in OneNote, see the example video of a few Pins being embedded in OneNote. You can now create pages, sections, and even entire notebooks chock-full of Pins! This integration works in OneNote Windows 10, Online, Mac, iPad, Android, and 2016.

Word for web

Here is an example of pasting a Pin into a Word for web document. This embed is currently only supported in Word of web.

We hope you enjoy this new integration to bring together three great apps that educators love!

Mike Tholfsen
Microsoft Education Product Manager
@mtholfsen

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Pinterest pins can now be interactively embedded into OneNote and Word appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

By integrating the Immersive Reader, Canvas makes their Pages content available for learners of all abilities and can help with access content and reading. Based on early feedback, we hope to enable Immersive Reader in even more places in the future. All of the capabilities built-in to the Immersive Reader will now be able to Canvas customers. The Immersive Reader has been in beta testing for Canvas users over the past year, and starting last week, is now at general availability, and free for institutions to enable.

“Last year Instructure became the first [LMS] provider to offer Immersive Reader for students,” said Mitch Benson, Instructure’s chief product officer, in a statement. “Our beta users love this tool because it demonstrably increases reading and writing comprehension, and is seamlessly woven inside the Canvas experience at no additional cost to schools. This is just one piece of the broader collaboration between Microsoft and Instructure that we’re excited to move forward in 2021.”

Educators are already excited about the new capabilities in Canvas. Monica Padilla, a 6^th grade science teacher from Highlands Middle School, says “I love the ease and simplicity of immersive reader and how it helps me serve my students. Canvas is so easy to use and add assignments too. Immersive reader will make equal access to content available to all of my students.”

This integration is now freely available to all Canvas users worldwide. Make sure your institution or school has first enabled this via the IT Admin instructions. Once your school enables the Immersive Reader, any educator can flip it on – instructions are here.

Microsoft is thrilled to have Canvas integrate the Immersive Reader to make text and reading accessible to all!

Mike Tholfsen

Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Education

@mtholfsen

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Instructure Announces Immersive Reader is Available Free to Canvas Users appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

“School technology leaders are pressed to wring every last ounce of value out of their edtech purchases,” said Pete Weir, Discovery Education’s Chief Product Officer. “That’s why we are so glad to work with Microsoft on this important integration. The addition of Immersive Reader makes all Discovery Education’s digital services and resources even more useful to the schools we serve.”

Since we launched the Immersive Reader as a Cognitive Service, we’ve seen a great deal of excitement from educators and schools eager to combine the power of Immersive Reader with Discovery’s intuitive instructional tool. Immersive Reader is included in both the Studio tool and Glossary.

In addition to Studio, here is an example of the Immersive Reader integrated with the Discovery Education glossary.

Teachers and students using Discovery Education’s K-12 learning platform can now find within Studio the icon for Immersive Reader—Microsoft’s free tool using proven techniques to improve reading for people regardless of their age or ability. This inclusive education tool gives more students personalized access to their curriculum, optimizes teacher time, and improves learning outcomes. Through features such as read aloud, line focus, translation and grammar markings, as well as the ability to adjust the size, style, and color of the font, learning becomes even more accessible to all students. Users of STEM Connect and Science Techbook can find Immersive Reader in the Studio slideshows feature, and users of the Math and Social Studies Techbooks can find Immersive Reader in those services’ interactive glossary.

Get Started Today

To begin exploring how to integration the Immersive Reader into your app or service, here are some helpful getting start links:

• Immersive Reader as a Cognitive Service details: https://aka.ms/ImmersiveReaderCS
• Software Development Kit (SDK): https://github.com/Microsoft/immersive-reader-sdk
• Documentation: https://aka.ms/ImmersiveReaderSDKDocs
• Getting Started videos: https://aka.ms/ImmersiveReaderSDKVideos

We look forward to hearing your feedback, and partners enabling the Immersive Reader to help even more people with reading.

Mike Tholfsen

Product Manager, Microsoft Education

@mtholfsen

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Discovery Education integrates with Immersive Reader to make learning more accessible for all appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

What is auto-grading?

We designed the auto-grading feature both to save educators’ time and to provide students with immediate feedback. Auto-grading kicks in for any multiple-choice, text, or ranking question if you have marked or entered the correct answer to a question.

Teacher’s View After Student Submits Quiz

By default, your quiz settings will “Show results automatically,” which means that after students submit the quiz, they can click a button to view their results. On this “View Results” page, they can see which questions they answered correctly or incorrectly, given you marked the correct answer when creating the quiz.

Student View of “View Results” Page

Tip #1: Provide automatic feedback on answer choices

You can automatically give students specific feedback based on the answers they picked in response to multiple choice questions. You can do so by hovering to the right side of a multiple-choice answer, clicking the speech bubble icon, and typing your comment.

If you use the “Show results automatically” setting, your students can view the comment for the answers they chose on the “View Results” page after they submit the quiz. If you decide not to use “Show results automatically,” students will see the comments only after you “Post Scores” for the quiz. They can do so by visiting the original link of the quiz. This “auto-feedback” feature is a great way for you to offer positive comments on a correct answer or constructive explanations on why an answer was incorrect.

Tip #2: Inform your students that their initial score under “View Results” might not be final

Because auto-grading currently only supports multiple-choice, text, and ranking questions, other types of questions you include in your quiz will require manual grading later. Thus, if you use “Show results automatically,” students will seemingly get zero points for non-auto-graded questions, as those questions have not been graded yet.

Therefore, the overall score they see at the top of their results page will be artificially low. Only after you finish manually grading and post scores will the score on the results page be final.

An important tip is to inform your students that the score they immediately see on the “View Results” page are not final until you have officially posted scores. Then, students can visit the quiz at the original link to find their final scores.

Tip #3: Take an extra step to ensure auto-grading works for your text and ranking questions

If you plan to use auto-grading for questions that require a text response, a best practice is to add all possible correct answers. The auto-grading is not case sensitive, but it looks for an exact match in terms of spelling and punctuation. Thus, you might want to add all acceptable answers, including ones with misspellings, to save time manually grading later.

If you plan to use auto-grading for ranking questions, a best practice is either to mark the question as “required” or to make a note in the description of the question for your students to click on the ranking choices. The auto-grading kicks in only if the student engages with the question; otherwise, it assumes that the student left the question unanswered. Even if the ranking order looks correct at first sight, to ensure they have answered the question, your students still need to click on the answer choices, so that the order numbers appear.

Tip #4: Use “Show Results Automatically” only if you want to provide instant feedback to your students

Show Results Automatically Option in Quiz Settings

“Show Results Automatically” is a powerful feature, as students can see both automatically graded questions and automatic feedback to their answer choices, which we will discuss in the next tip. With this feature, you could be more efficient in your teaching, but you will want to keep the following in mind:

• “Show Results Automatically” might be more appropriate for lower stakes or normal check-in quizzes, rather than for higher stakes exams.
• If your quiz includes several questions that will require manual grading, either due to the question type or the need to offer partial credit, or if you plan to offer manual feedback on students’ answers, you might want to avoid using “Show Results Automatically.”
• If you want to have higher control with ensuring integrity during quiz-taking, we suggest that you not use this setting.

Nonetheless, even if you do not use “Show Results Automatically”, you are still able to use the auto-grading feature of Forms to assist you in quicker grading.

Tip #5: Consider turning off “Show Results Automatically” and using “Shuffle Options” or “Shuffle Questions” to promote academic integrity

However, regardless of whether “Show Results Automatically” is turned on or off, students will not be able to find answers anywhere in the source code before submitting the quiz. If you still plan to use “Show Results Automatically,” your students can see the answers after they submit the quiz. Given that the “View Results” page reveals the auto-graded correct answers, it will be challenging to prevent students from taking a screenshot or copy-pasting this information somewhere else.

For further assurance, a good tip is to turn on the “Shuffle questions” feature in your Forms quiz settings. For multiple-choice questions, you can also turn on “Shuffle Options.”

Shuffle Questions Option in Quiz Settings

Shuffle Options for Multiple Choice Question

We hope these five tips are helpful to you as you begin teaching again in 2021. You can find resources on Forms for educators specifically here and watch our session for the ISTE 2020 Conference, “Remote Teaching Simplified with Microsoft Forms”, here.

For more questions you might have, please visit our support page. If you have additional feedback on Forms’ surveys, quizzes, or polls, please visit our Forms UserVoice site.

Mike Tholfsen
Microsoft Education Product Manager
@mtholfsen

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Five Essential Tips on Auto-grading for Microsoft Forms Quizzes appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

Educators around the world use H5P to create interactive learning resources and digital materials for their classroom. There are hundreds of H5P templates available to pick from and teachers and students can create interactive presentations, infographics and escape rooms easily and no programming or design skills required. H5P aims to change the way we communicate, from static, boring content, to interactive, engaging presentations and materials. Visual, interactive content is normally hard and expensive to develop. But with H5P creating interactive content becomes, fun, simple and affordable for everyone.

As of today, you can now paste any H5P.com URL on to a OneNote page and it will render it as a live interactive embed. You can now create pages, section, and even entire notebooks chock-full of H5P! A great way to make learning more fun and easy, together.

To see some examples or how easy this is to do, see the example video of an H5P in OneNote. This integration works in OneNote Windows 10, Online, Mac, iPad, Android, and 2016

Demo of H5P content embedded in OneNote

We hope you enjoy this new integration to bring together two great apps that students and educators love!

Mike Tholfsen
Microsoft Education Product Manager
@mtholfsen

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Announcing new H5P and OneNote integration to help bring interactive content to life appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

We’re excited to announce that new updates are now available on PowerPoint for Mac that allow users to record presenter video and inking during their Record Slide Show sessions. These new capabilities will enable you to create more robust recorded presentations. We hope that this feature can help simplify your presentation recording process and better engage your audience.

Here are some features that will be new in Record Slide Show on PowerPoint for Mac:

Presenter video recording

You can now record a video of yourself to go along with slides that you are presenting. Draw your audience’s attention by making it feel like you are giving the presentation live.

Use the new recording toolbar right under your camera to configure, start, pause, and stop your recording. Playback what you’ve recorded and rerecord when necessary.

Presenter drawing recording

You can also now record notes taken with the pen or highlighter tool. Any drawing done in the recording state will be captured. When you or your audience member plays the presentation back, it will seem like you are drawing on the slides in real time.

Laser pointer recording

Similar to recording for the pen tool, you can now record your laser pointer movements while using Record Slide Show. Motion towards different portions of your slides to pull the audience’s attention.

Want to be among the first to use the new feature? Make sure you join our Office Insiders Program to get the first look at new features from Office.

Additional new PowerPoint features available today:

Record Audio

Recording audio for your PowerPoint presentation is easier than ever. Recent upgrades to PowerPoint for Mac make recording audio and inserting it into your slides simple with the new Record Audio pane.

Learn more about the experience here.

Export PPT as Animated GIF

Have you ever had an idea for an animated GIF but didn’t know where to get started? With the Export/Save As Animated GIF feature, you can create your ideas in PowerPoint! Use shapes, images, ink, animations, and transitions to create a wide variety of GIFs.

Learn more about how to use the experience here.

Link to this Slide

Have you ever been working with a colleague on a PowerPoint presentation, and wanted to send them a link to a particular slide? With the Link to this Slide feature, you can save time and avoid any confusion by creating a link that will open the file and take them directly to a specific slide in your presentation. Save your file to OneDrive, right-click on the slide you want to link to and select “Link to this Slide” to help your colleagues quickly access the location you’d like to reference.

Learn more about this feature here.

Mike Tholfsen

Principal Product Manager

Microsoft Education

@mtholfsen

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Record Slide Show in PowerPoint for Mac coming soon, plus additional PPT updates available today appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

The Immersive Reader was originally inspired by focusing on students with dyslexia, and we used the latest science and research around reading while using inclusive design principles to empower students and workers of all abilities. Today, more than 23 million people every month are using the Immersive Reader, improving their reading and writing comprehension. To build on Dyslexia Awareness month and National Disability Employment Awareness Month, we are excited to announce a set up updates that bring this powerful literacy tool to even more places!

Immersive Reader is coming to more Microsoft apps

PowerPoint gets more inclusive

One of the top requests we’ve heard from students, parents and educators has been to add the Immersive Reader to PowerPoint. It has also been a top UserVoice request for the PowerPoint team. Today we are thrilled to announce that we are adding the Immersive Reader to PowerPoint in two areas.

You’ll be able to select any text on a PowerPoint slide and choose the Immersive Reader (see the demo below). The other area was inspired directly by Molly Paris. Molly and her mother visited the Microsoft campus last year and Molly told us how helpful it would be for her to be able to access the Immersive Reader in the Notes area of PowerPoint. We’re happy to announce to Molly and everyone else that we will be adding the Immersive Reader access on the Notes section of every slide as well. This will roll out later this year.

OneDrive adding the Immersive Reader for documents

OneDrive is a great place to store and access documents and other content. To enable better access to content, we’re adding the Immersive Reader directly into the OneDrive menus to launch it on Word documents and text files. This will roll out later this year.

Forms Embedded into OneNote

OneNote has long had the ability to embed Forms on the canvas, and more recently we added the Immersive Reader for Forms. With our most recent update, students can now enable the Immersive Reader for Forms embedded into OneNote. This works for Math Quizzes in OneNote and complex equations. To access this, in the Form in OneNOte, choose the “…” menu, and then Enable Immersive Reader

New Partners Integrate Immersive Reader

• itslearning is Europe’s leading LMS provider and the learning platform is designed for teaching, because our mission is to improve education through technology. ItsLearningbelieves that while technology will never replace dedicated teachers, it can help great teachers transform lives.

  Hope Cameron, a Social Studies teacher at Wausau East, Wisconsin has been using the Immersive Reader in her class and says “Immersive Reader has been very good for struggling readers to consume text. We’ve been working on the civil war, and I copied a long old newspaper article into an itsLearning Note, which the students then could use Immersive Reader to open. Having Immersive Reader in itslearning means fewer clicks and better availability.”Frøydis Hamre, itsLearning Product Manager says “Immersive Reader is an addition to our platform that makes such a big difference to students who need help understanding text. It makes it so much easier for all students to understand and engage with the tasks and information given by their teachers.”

• Edji’s goal is to empower teachers by creating an engaging, real-time environment where students read and share thoughts. Using Edji, students publish their ideas to their class as easily as highlighting a sentence. Readers use text, audio, and even emoji to express their thoughts. Teachers control if students see their peers’ comments. It’s perfect for creating a real-time discussion in a blended learning environment, or an in-person classroom. Using Immersive Reader, students can read the material (including PDFs), and other student thoughts.

Edji has always helped me to put students’ ideas front and center. Adding Immersive Reader opens doors to ensure more students can read and discuss with the class! The best discussions are inclusive, so IR is a natural fit.

Will Stewart, 5th grade teacher at Westwood Intermediate School in Spring Lake Park, MN

18 new Neural Text-to-Speech languages

We are always looking to broaden the languages and locales of Immersive Reader. Today we are excited to announce 18 new Neural TTS languages for the Immersive Reader. Neural Text-to-Speech is the “human sounding” read aloud voices that we’ve been rolling out for many languages.

Neural TTS has now been extended to support 18 new languages/locales. They are Bulgarian, Czech, German (Austria), German (Switzerland), Greek, English (Ireland), French (Switzerland), Hebrew, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Tamil, Telugu and Vietnamese. Chinese (Cantonese, Traditional) and HsiaoYu in Chinese (Taiwanese Mandarin). Read the blog for the new list, and explore the full list of Neural TTS languages.

In addition to these product updates, Microsoft was setup up educator training sessions throughout the month of October on how Microsoft Learning Tools can support student success in reading, writing and math. Register here.

Mike Tholfsen

Principal Product Manager

Microsoft Education

@mtholfsen

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Immersive Reader comes to PowerPoint and OneDrive plus more updates for Dyslexia Awareness Month appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

1) More inclusive with OneNote Live Captions

As announced at the BETT conference earlier this year, OneNote will be adding a Live Captions feature which allows any student to connect OneNote to Microsoft Translator captions via a Join Code and receive the translation stream directly into the OneNote app.  This allows captions from the educator speaking to flow directly into OneNote for reading, while still allowing the student to take notes. In addition, the student can pause the captions, highlight portions, and then have the entire transcription saved as a page into OneNote. This feature will benefit all learners but especially those who may be hard of hearing or speak a different native language than the educator. The private education-only preview rolls out in OneNote web next week to our Education Insider program.

2) Embed Adobe Spark Videos and Posts into OneNote

Educators love Adobe Spark, and they also love OneNote! Adobe Spark lets students and educators transform their ideas into stunning visual stories. Today we are excited to announce support for embedding Adobe Spark Videos and Posts directly into OneNote. This will allow educators and students to interactively engage with the content. We look to add additional Adobe Spark product support to embed in OneNote in the future.

Note: Adobe Spark posts currently work on OneNote Windows 10, OneNote Online, OneNote iPad and Mac. OneNote 2016 support will come in the future

You can find the entire list of OneNote Embed partners here.

3) Class Notebook and Microsoft Teams Updates

So many educators today are using Microsoft Teams in their in-person or virtual classroom, so ensuring the OneNote Class and Staff Notebook is a core part of that experience is critical. Today we are excited to announce a set of improvements for OneNote inside of Teams.

Roster updates from School Data Sync automatically update the Class Notebook roster

In the past, when School Data Sync made roster updates from the students in the class, these updates would not happen until the educator went and clicked on the “Class Notebook” tab in the Class Team, which was a big complaint and time waster. Now, these SDS updates automatically flow to the OneNote Class Notebook, and the educator saves a bit of time!

Set Channels to create sections in Collaboration Space or Content Library

This feature was inspired directly from Dr. David Kellermann of UNSW in Australia. For the past few years, when creating a new channel, all Sections are created in the Collaboration Space, with no other option. Dr. Kellerman teaches his classes by using Teams channels as units, and always wanted to have any channel he created make a read-only Section in the Content Library of his Class Notebook. With this new update, the educator has the option to choose where new Sections go. THanks to Dr. Kellermann for the inspiration! This update will be found in a new option under “Manage Notebook” inside of Teams, and rolls out in late August.

A better First Run Experience for then “Notes” section in a Channel

To make it easier and more obvious that the “Notes” section in a new Channel is part of the Class Notebook or Staff, we’ve added a first run page that explicitly explains the link between the channel Notes and the Class/Staff Notebook.

Create a new OneNote page in the “New File” dialog of Assignments

When educators are creating assignments, or students are attaching work, it’s handy to be able to create a New File on the fly. Currently, Teams Assignments supports creating a new Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. We will be adding the ability to also create a blank OneNote page, that can easily be filled out, through the New File dialog.

Page Distribution speed improvements

One of the top requests we’ve had is to speed up Page Distribution when using the OneNote Class Notebook toolbar. Our engineers have been hard at work over the summer, and we’ve made a large set of improvements that speed up page distribution on average by 65%! Mileage may vary, but overall educators and students should experience a significant performance improvements when distributing pages. Also be sure to follow our OneNote Best Practices when using the Class Notebook toolbar.

Students and Educators get a notification when a page is distributed
A great benefit of using the Class Notebook inside of Teams is the Class Notebook bot. We are making a new update that will allow any Educator using Page Distribution in the OneNote client, to ensure that all students get a notification in Teams after the page is distributed! This has been a top UserVoice request that we are glad to take care of. This notification will work for educators using the Class Notebook Toolbar in OneNote Windows 10, iPad, Web and Mac. 

The “Teacher Only” Section Group is enabled by default now

A common request from educators is to just enable the “Teacher Only” section group by default. It takes extra clicks to go and do this after the Class or Staff Notebook is set up. So we’ve recently made a change so this will always be enabled by default, and save educators a few clicks.

For those of you that like lists, here are the updates in list format, with the dates as well:

1. Roster updates from School Data Sync automatically update the Class Notebook roster – live now
2. Page Distribution speed improvements – live now
3. The “Teacher Only” Section Group is enabled by default now – live now
4. A better First Run Experience for then “Notes” section in a Channel – live now
5. Embed Adobe Spark Videos and Posts into OneNote – live now
6. OneNote Live Captions – private beta rollouts to our Education Insiders this week
7. Set Channels to create sections in Collaboration Space or Content Library – end of August
8. Create a new OneNote page in the “New File” dialog of Assignments – early September
9. Students and Educators get a notification when a page is distributed – September

We hope you enjoy these new OneNote updates! Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or comments.

Mike Tholfsen

Principal Product Manager

Microsoft Education

@mtholfsen

This post was originally published on this site.

The post 9 Back to School Updates for OneNote and Class Notebooks – August 2020 appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

From discussions with students and teachers, we know that writing tools today do not alert students to the need for a citation or help them add citations early enough in the writing process.

“There have been a lot of changes lately in how we teach plagiarism and make it more of a learning process rather than a gotcha. The fact that this can catch things as students are writing is excellent.” – High School Teacher, History

We are pleased to announce that Editor’s Similarity checker feature, available in Microsoft Word for Microsoft 365 EDU A3 and A5 customers, is currently available in Office preview builds. The feature will release to general availability in July.

Powered by Bing Search, the Similarity checker can identify and help writers with originality in their writing and learn more about appropriate attribution through tools that facilitate the easy insertion of relevant citations. This can aid writers in focusing less on the mechanics of writing, and more on the content.

Critically, the Similarity checker makes this functionality available to students while they are still in the writing process. While in the past teachers viewed plagiarism-checking software as a punitive/”gotcha” moment at submission time, teachers are trending towards empowering their students to find their authentic voice while leveraging citations as appropriate. Coupling similarity detection with citation tools presents an opportunity to provide guidance when it will be most effective to improve writing outcomes.

“At the end of the day, no teacher wants to fail a student for plagiarizing. I think of it as my own failure when a student fails. Most teachers would feel glad to know that students have a bit more empowerment.” – High School Teacher, English

To learn more about Editor’s Similarity checker in Microsoft Word, visit https://aka.ms/similaritychecker.

To learn more about Microsoft Editor, visit http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-editor.

Michael Heyns
Microsoft Word Program Manager

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Editor’s Similarity checker in Microsoft Word – helping writers with originality and attribution appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

What we hear from educators is that they need to be able to transition to remote learning quickly, to connect in a community to share best practices, and to learn from each other.

Based on feedback from our Remote Learning Educator Community, we’ve outlined five ways to help you get the most out of Microsoft Teams, a digital hub for communication and collaboration, during remote learning:

1. Connection and collaboration: Use the Teams built-in meetings features to effectively hold classroom meetings, collaborate on virtual whiteboards, and share documents. With assignments, conversations, files, notes, and video calls all pulled together, Teams is a great all-in-one hub for the collaborative classroom. Here is a great Teams for Education Quick Start Guide, and we have new updates rolling out regularly with improvements that have been inspired by educators.
2. Inclusion: In order to ensure learners of all abilities are included, understanding which tools and technologies improve accessibility and foster an inclusive classroom becomes critical. With built-in capabilities like the Immersive Reader, message translation, and Live Captions for meetings, Teams is a non-stigmatizing platform.
3. Meaningful feedback with rubrics: An important part of remote learning is good teaching practice. Teams Assignments have built-in rubrics. Rubric grading helps increase assignment transparency for students and allows you to give more meaningful feedback. These feedback mechanisms not only help students learn and improve their work, but they’re also a consistent and transparent way for teachers to grade. This has been an incredibly popular feature with both educators and students, and with rubrics now easily sharable, we have seen this practice take off in Teams.
4. Staff and learning communities: Saving time, being more organized, and collaborating more effectively during remote learning is critical. With Teams being a hub for education, a core part of this also includes built-in Staff teams and Professional Learning Community (PLC) teams to go along with Class Teams. This provides a one-stop shop for educators. Staff Teams and PLC teams allow educators and staff to easily communicate and collaborate during remote learning. We’ve seen many three-ring binders tossed with the paperless use of Staff and PLC teams in schools.
5. OneNote Class Notebooks, built into Teams: OneNote is a multifaceted note-taking tool that is built into Teams and can be used for a variety of lessons and activities. With OneNote Class Notebooks, you have a personal workspace for every student, a content library for handouts, and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities. You can also embed all sorts of interactive apps, lessons, and content onto the OneNote page. Especially with remote learning, paper notes and handouts are difficult to work with, and having a digital notebook for the class is a natural fit.

Remote learning is a journey for all of us, and we are grateful to the diligence and creativity of educators during this time. Please visit our Remote Learning Page (higher education here) and (K-12 here) for all of our resources. Thank you for all you have done for students around the world. We are looking forward to continuing to work with you.

The post Top 5 Ways Teachers Can Use Microsoft Teams During Remote Learning appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

Microsoft Education wants to ensure that all students, parents, guardians and educators are aware of and have access to the free inclusive tool and training materials across reading, writing, math and communication. Microsoft incorporates the principles of inclusive design in all of our education software to ensure our tools meet the needs of all learners. We like to say our tools are built-in, mainstream, non-stigmatizing and free. A great starting point is our broad categorized list of all of our Microsoft accessibility tools in this Sway.

Microsoft Learning Tools for the inclusive classroom

Microsoft Education has a set of learning tools for the inclusive classroom than span reading, writing math and communication. These tools are built natively into all of our products, including Teams, OneNote, Flipped, Minecraft, Forms, Word, PowerPoint and more. To help educators, parents, and students more easily learn and understand how these capabilities work together, we have a set of training resources, videos and other useful guides to help get started.

Immersive Reader

• Inclusive Classroom public deck: https://aka.ms/InclusiveDeck
• All About Immersive Reader page for PD: https://aka.ms/AllAboutImmersiveReader
• Immersive Reader partners: https://aka.ms/ImmersiveReaderPartners
• Dyslexia Awareness course on MEC: https://aka.ms/MECMadeByDyslexia

Quick tips video for the inclusive classroom

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdHjJccRYryNxhSobMBb9yo-Zjvp7pNQ_

Quick tips videos – English Language Learners and Their Families
ELL Quick tips

Playlist https://aka.m/ELLPD

Some of the most popular and sharable ways to ramp up quickly is to use our web-based, free, interactive training guides. We’ve made interactive click-through guides for each of the four categories of our tools across reading, writing, math and communication. These guides are easily sharable and are popular with educators, parents, students, and school leaders. We’ve created a guide for each topic, with links below:

• Inclusive Reading: https://aka.ms/InclusiveReadingDemo
• Inclusive Writing: https://aka.ms/InclusiveWritingDemo
• Inclusive Math: https://aka.ms/InclusiveMathDemo
• Inclusive Communication: https://aka.ms/InclusiveCommunicationDemo

I recently recorded an in-depth YouTube webinar titled Learning Tools for the Inclusive Classroom that covers Microsoft Learning tools in-depth. You can watch as I show each of scenario in detail.

Wrap up

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Ensure inclusive and accessible distance learning with free tools from Microsoft appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

While we work on these improvements, we encourage you to explore the many ways you can use Teams today for online classes and meetings. We have created several resources to support you and your class during remote learning. In this blog we have outlined how students, educators, and IT can maximize Teams for distance learning.

1. Getting started
2. Resources for educators
3. Learning Management System (LMS) integrations
4. Guidance for IT admins
5. What’s coming soon

Getting started 

• Creating, attending, and running meetings while using Teams for distance learning
• Teams for Education Quick Start Guide (PDF) that includes meetings and calls
• Microsoft Teams meetings training

Resources for educators

A how-to video or short webinar are convenient ways to learn directly from trusted experts. Below are a few that we recommend to help you quickly ramp up on Teams meetings.

Quick tips videos: Alice Keeler’s Teams meeting “micro-PD”

EdTech expert Alice Keeler has developed a helpful set of “micro-PD” YouTube videos in a Playlist so you can quickly ramp up on Teams meetings. Each video is :30 to :45 seconds long and designed for you to master tips for teaching in Teams in under a minute. See for yourself in the video below!

You can access Alice’s entire Teams meetings micro-PD playlist and for more training, here is her entire Microsoft Teams for Education micro-PD playlist. Bookmark both so you can reference at any time.

Webinar – Online lectures and classes with all your students

Dominic Williamson from our product team goes over how to use Teams meetings for distance learning for both K-12 and Higher Education students in this webinar.

Webinar – Using Teams Meetings in the classroom and what’s coming soon
Gordon Chang from our product group demonstrates Teams meetings and discusses the future roadmap in this webinar (you can also review the PowerPoint slides).

LMS Integrations

We recently announced that Teams meetings can now easily be integrated with the world’s leading Learning Management Systems (LMS). Learn how you can create a Teams meeting right from within Canvas, Blackboard, Schoology and other LMSs.

Are you an LMS developer who wants to enable Teams meeting creation from within your LMS? We’ve got you covered. Learn how to install the Teams app inside of your LMS here.

IT admin guidance

We want you to be aware of and familiar with the different policy settings for Teams as you deploy. Here are two essential articles that all IT Admins should reference to get the most out of Teams meetings.

• IT Admin guidance for setting up meetings
• Manage meetings policies in Teams

What we are working on

We have been listening closely to educators and have already integrated your feedback into our product plans. Here are the features we are currently recently announced, and we have many more being active worked on in UserVoice for Teams and education that you can get the latest status on. Just look for the “Working on it” status in UserVoice items

As we work to improve the Teams meetings experience for instruction, our top commitment is reliable service delivery to each school and university using Teams. We are also prioritizing features that ensure student safety by making it easier for educators to manage their online classes in Teams meetings.

Thank you again for making time to share your remote learning experiences with us! It is through your feedback that we can build a more useful education tool. Please continue to share your feedback and ideas through UserVoice and feel free to track all of these features on the public roadmap. We’ll continue to share updates on what we’re working on and what you can expect in the weeks to come.

This post was originally published on this site.

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