Coming up
We'll take a look at new Classroom experience with Office 365.
Including how you can bring everything in one place
to drive collaboration.
Including your files,
conversations, and assignments.
And use familiar Office apps.
Included OneNote and now even Sway.
And if you're in IT
we'll show you how you can light up these new experiences
for your school.
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined today Ari Schorr
from the education team.
Welcome.
Great to be here.
Ari, I know you've done a lot of work with Office 365
in education.
What's behind all that?
So were really trying to bring custom productivity solutions
to the classroom for teachers and students.
And, building off some of the
familiar learning tools that we have with
Word, Excel, PowerPoint
and OneNote.
But, also bringing in new learning tools like
Sway
to really give a
great collaboration experience within the classroom.
Can we take a look?
Yeah, sure.
So taking a look at the
Office 365 new Microsoft Classroom experience
you can see it's really built on Office 365 groups
where you have the classes along the left hand side.
So Art and Biology 8A.
And then there's another type of group that I want to first show you
which is the PLC group
or Professional Learning Community group.
And that's really where
teachers can collaborate together.
It's kind of like the teachers lounge or something then, right?
Exactly.
So if we jump into the PLC group.
Very similar to what you saw with Office 365 groups.
But it's got relevant content
for educators.
So, with the new connectors
within Office 365 groups
you'll be able to bring in things like
Twitter feeds
like #edtech
a conversation that's happening outside of the school boundary.
Right.
And then, you have relevant materials like a notebook.
A OneNote notebook that has things like
Smart Goals
or Meeting Minutes
from that meeting with your co teacher.
And then, it also has things built in
like the new Office 365 Planner.
And, so if you go into Planner
what's great, is you can track the status of tasks.
As well as you know, if you look at the board
you can add relevant categories of tasks.
So if I go over here to Buckets
I can see I have to grade homework 2.
Decide on roles.
I can check that off.
So that's great to have a place to manage all my task
within that PLC environment.
This is really a good use case for planner especially.
If you think about a teaching environment
you have to have a teacher and a couple of teachers assistants.
They're in planner
basically able to assign tasks
manage those projects.
Whether its in science fair.
A field trip.
The classroom itself.
Really great experiences.
But, beyond what we are seeing here from that teachers lounge perspective
what does the Classroom experience look like?
Yeah, the Classroom experience is again
just a slight tweak on that.
So if you jump back into classroom
you can see that we have our Office 365 groups.
We've pinned some favorites
like Biology 8A
and I can just jump right into that.
And when I jump in
the thing that I see is
the thing that's most relevant to teachers and students
which is assignments.
And so, in the Assignments obviously
I have the list
I can see how many been turned in.
How many have been graded.
But, what I want to do is show you
the instructional piece of it.
So, how do these assignments get populated in here?
I could just add an assignment from here
but most the time
from what we've seen with the momentum in education.
The teachers and students are spending time in the Class Notebook.
So, if I jump over to the Class Notebook
I can just launched that within OneNote.
And what you see is
this custom built environment
for teachers and students to work together.
And that has areas for collaboration.
So, teachers since have full access to that.
And, then there's a Content Library
which is where Handouts
Class Notes
Assignments
can all be held
in kind of like a digital filing cabinet
and then distributed to students to complete.
Okay.
And that's where students get their personal notebooks
to then complete those assignments.
So if we jump into
the Content Library for a second
you can see we have
different homework assignments
as pages within OneNote.
We have this Biology Homework 3
that we would like to distribute
to all the students.
And so, if we do that
we just go with a new Class Notebook add-in
which is built into OneNote
and say, Create Assignment.
And when we do that
we can just grab the description
that is already populated in their
off of the content on the page.
Maybe we want to
give it a little more color and say label
that plant cell structure.
We can create it in
all the assignments sections of those students notebooks.
We can assign a due date.
So, say we want to make it do not on a Saturday
probably on a Monday
you would hope.
And then just hit Create.
It will actually send the assignment
using an assignment service
out to Microsoft Classroom.
And so, if we just back into the browser
we can actually see that new assignment
Homework 3
show up in here.
And you see that if you scroll down, right there.
So, it's important to note that even though I've already distributed
the assignment to Microsoft Classroom.
A teacher or student
may have a separate learning management system already in place.
And so, What's great is I can actually connect
to those learning management systems via an assignment service
like I just showed you
via this drop down here too.
So I can see other learning management systems like
Blackboard, Canvas, and Edmoto.
And we can push that same assignment to those.
And so, if I go into the browser I can just jump over to
Biology Homework 3
within Canvas
another learning management system.
So, it really fits the needs of whatever
these teachers are already using in their classrooms.
Right, very flexible.
And so now
the next thing the teacher wants to do is review the student work.
And so to do that
she actually has a button within the OneNote Class Notebook add-inn
to just pull up all of the assignments
within those students notebooks.
So, if I hit Review Student Work
it pops up a pane.
I can look at that assignment that I just distributed
Biology Homework 3.
I can sort by last name of the students
and I can enter grades.
So now that we have the grades connected
from Microsoft Classroom
we can actually just jump into
any of the students personal notebooks.
So, in this case you want to look at William Hunt
the student.
And, you can just click on his notebook here.
So, I could pinch-to-zoom
using OneNote's touch capabilities.
scroll down, see if he's labeled this
Plant Cell Structure correctly.
I can even look at some of his supplementary materials.
He's got an embedded PowerPoint on there
that I could open up if I wanted to.
And then I can just ink the grades on their.
Which, inking is one of the big benefits of OneNote.
So I can ink nine out of ten.
Give him his grade
in line here.
Hit submit.
And send that off
to the assignment service.
Shows up in Microsoft Classroom
or whatever learning management system
we have in our school.
I'm really excited about that because of two things.
I'm going to switch roles I'm going to be William Hunt.
Because I'm a student in your class
I just want to show you what the experience looks like
for me using OneNote in this experience.
So, now I've got OneNote open.
And, here you can see
I've only got the things that I'm allowed to see as William Hunt.
So if I click into My Own Notes
As you see, I have my handouts.
You saw the photosynthesis thing earlier.
All of my assignments.
And there's that biology homework that you assigned to me
just now.
Also my genetics homework
and my class notes.
Everything I have taken in terms of notes through your classes.
And I go back to my handout here
there's another cool tool I want to point out
that I can use as William.
The learning tools.
Now what that allows me to do is actually launch into an immersive reader.
And that will actually read back
the assignment to me
using narrator inside of Windows
Take Photosynthesis Quiz
and I can also see some really great views
in terms of reading comprehension
to make that better.
One last thing I want to show you
is I can also take a quiz.
In this case, were using Office Forms.
It's really cool.
It's going to open up that Office Form
give me all these different
in this case, radio buttons
and things that I can then use to actually fill in that quiz.
And once I submit that to you
you can actually see that
and grade it in the same way that we just saw.
With real-time results.
I can see how I did actually on that quiz.
Really cool. Very integrated stuff here.
Now, another thing that we can do with students
and another great tool that we have is Sway.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to open up sway
and I've got a couple other students I'm working on this with.
Here I've got two authors in the dock right now.
And really what Sway does is it allows me to
import pictures and text into this
really rich multimedia layout here on the web.
And that does all the design work for me.
So I don't have to worry about all the Wiziwig work
of getting all the images and everything in the right spot.
It gives me a great design.
A great way to actually tell the story.
In this case of endangered species.
Puts all of the
pictures in the right spot
at the right size of the amount of emphasis
And all of that I can collaborate with my classmates on
to really have an excellent
experience and be able to use some of the newer tools even in Office
to really help with my classroom
and with the students I'm working with.
What's actually really great about Sway
is that we're gonna be bringing that
into the new classroom experience.
We're actually working with the team
to make sure that assignments
like Sway can be integrated
submitted
and graded.
Very similar to what you showed with OneNote.
Very cool.
But, there's one aspect I think we should talk about here.
Because as the teacher
typically, you have to do a lot of things in terms of managing
the students that are in your class
and all of that work to get them into one group.
Very manual.
That gets a bit different in this case. Right?
Exactly.
We actually have a new service called
School Data Sync.
That will allow you to populate all of those student names
and rosters into Office 365 groups.
So it's really easy in terms of School Data Sync.
And if you think about it from educator perspective
you've got a couple of things that
that you're typically using in order to manage your students.
Your teachers.
All the different, but we call objects
and directory services of worlds
in your classroom.
So in our case, you're gonna take our school
or our student information system
all the teachers, the teacher rosters, the school information
the students etc.
Move that through our School Data Sync.
The SDS here.
And that's going to basically populate everything in to Office 365.
So we have Azure Active Directory then backing up
and putting everybody into groups
and doing all the stuff that we just saw here.
The classrooms all organized.
I'll show you what that looks like.
It's really quite easy to get all that running.
So here I've got the
SDS open.
If you go to the link below, you can see how to access that.
I created a profile called
School for Mechanics.
Now, first thing I have to do
is actually take an output of all my SIS information
as CSV files.
And here I've got about a half a dozen CSV files for school.
Sections or classes, the students, student enrollment,
teacher, teacher roster.
And, here is just a section.
This is like a class
with the IDs.
The names of the classes.
All of the start and stop dates of the classes.
So all of that is ready to go.
Once I select all those things
and hit open.
That's basically going to start
giving me the ability to upload that into our SDS.
After that's done
I've now got all the files archived in the SDS.
I can start the sync.
And what the sync is going to do is take all of that data.
Merge it together.
And then give me effectively a data structure
that has all my classes, my students, my teachers everything.
In this view that you saw
where it's all organized for me.
That really saves teachers a ton of time, doesn't it?
Right, so that's going to save you a ton of time.
When that's all done and ready to go
I'm just going to click into my view teachers, students and sections tab.
Now I can see all my courses.
Math, Science, English.
I can click into my teachers
and I can see all the teachers that are put in.
This is a smaller school.
There's only three teachers.
And that's about half a dozen students in our school.
But, we have all the students already enrolled.
So very quick, very easy to get everybody in my classroom.
That's amazing.
And it can sync every night if you wanted to.
So even when there are changes in enrollment for a particular class
that all shows up in my Classroom experience.
It's really great to see all of these things come together.
Of course, you can try all of this at the link below
if you want to try out the classroom experiences
and also if you're in the IT department.
Check out the link below
to try out School Data Sync for yourselves.
Of course, keep watching Microsoft Mechanics
for all the latest updates.
Thanks for watching
and goodbye for now.
Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com/mechanics
Microsoft