Hello and welcome to Mr Tompkins Edtech. In today’s video I’m going to show you
how to make a homepage for your groups within Teams. This can be used to highlight all the
great content that can be found within the group itself, or anywhere else in office 365
for that matter. You can include links to youtube, Microsoft stream, any sharepoint
libraries your school uses, and pretty much anywhere else for that matter.
It’s a great way to highlight important content to your students or team, which might
otherwise get lost amongst all the many posts and files and comments that start collecting
when you have been using your team for a while. I’ll be showing you how to add particular
documents and resources, and even how to include dynamic content, so it automatically pulls
in the latest video recordings or documents you’ve shared without you having to do a
thing. So if you are using Teams with your classes or colleagues and want to create a
homepage to highlight your most important links and resources, then keep watching.
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Ok lets get into it – First up, lets start this video off having
a look at a homepage I made for our staff team within Teams. So you can see I’ve added
it as a tab into the Staff group, so there is a link to it sitting up here that I can
click to access this page. Right at the top of the page it’s got a
nice banner you can add. I’ve called this page the “Virtual Staffroom” as I had
in mind those good old days where we actually sat down for a few minutes each day and shared
useful stuff with each other, and I wanted this page to be the digital equivalent of
that. The first content I have here is the video
recordings of our Monday staff briefings given by our head teacher each week. This is dynamic
content, which means I’ve told it what type of content to find, and it finds anything
that matches. That way, come next Monday, the next video will get automatically slotted
into here without me having to do anything. Running down the right side I have our College’s
Teaching and Learning Team’s twitterfeed. Again, you can just point this at a particular
twitter handle or keyword, and the page will then keep itself updated with the latest tweets.
Next I have “recently shared documents”, another dynamic content section, which will
automatically show thumbnails of the latest documents being shared by our staff team.
Clicking on these tiles will take you directly to these documents.
So this one leads to a whole school report showing students attendance and engagement
in our daily live lessons we are putting out as a school. I actually did a video on how
I made this report – so follow this link here if you want to find out more about that.
Tapping back up here will take me back to the virtual staffroom. You can see these nice
big thumbnails give a good idea about what the content is going to be about, so it’s
a nice easy way for your team members to find what they are looking for.
Below that, we’ve got another dynamic section, this time pulling out the latest videos from
Microsoft Stream that have the word “assembly” in the title, so tutors can quickly find these
to share with their students. These will play directly in the page, and you can full screen
these if you want. Below that, I’ve got some of my training
videos that I want all staff to be aware of to help them with remote learning. These link
to videos I’ve got on youtube, and again you can see that they will play right within
the page.
Next we have some frequently used documents, that staff will often be looking for. I’ve
got the weekly behaviour report, which is a big report that is produced once a week.
These reports are run in excel and saved into the same folder on our staff communal sharepoint
site that we use as a network drive in our school. So again, I’ve told this page to
go and fetch the latest report and show it here. When the next report comes out, this
page will show that instead. Similarly over here I’ve got the latest
data drops for various year groups which again are saved on our staff shared site, and this
page is pulling up the latest sets of data available.
I'm not asking it to go find this particular document or that particular document
But I'm just asking it to find any document that match certain criteria.
As well as linking to various documents, you can also embed them if you wish. Here I’ve
embedded an excel spreadsheet that’s used to host our school calendar. It’s interactive,
so I can move it around to find what I’m looking for without having to go to the trouble
of opening the file. If I do want to open it, I can just click down here, which will
open it up in the excel webapp. At the bottom I’ve got the staff handbook,
today’s weather in Leicester, and also in Barbuda, just to rub it in a little, and then
over here we have a countdown in days, hours, minutes and seconds to the half term holidays….only
4 days to go! Now I hope you can see this is a pretty useful
page, and it surfaces a lot of content that is within the team itself or in other areas
of Office 365 that staff will be using.
Now this page is actually created in SharePoint, which you may or may not be aware sits underneath
Microsoft Teams, and provides a lot of the storage and resources that Teams uses. Once
you know this, you can start leveraging SharePoint to add extra functionality to Teams that Microsoft
haven’t got around to yet. I’m sure they will one day come up with a way for users
to directly make something like this from within Teams, but in the meantime, I’ll
show you how you can pull back the curtain and see what’s behind Teams making it work,
and how we can use SharePoint to build one of these cool homepages that we can embed
directly in Teams. Ok, so in Teams pick a group you want to do
this with and go to the files section of the team. Now up here on the title bar, you’ll
see “open in SharePoint”, and if we tap here, its going to reveal where your files
really live. They don’t live in Teams at all – they are in a SharePoint site that
Teams secretly created for you when you when the group was created.
So you can see I’ve ended up in a webpage. The title bar tells me I’m in sharepoint,
and I can see I’m in a sharepoint site which has the same name and logo as the Team that
I came from. In the centre of the page, I can see the same
files and folders that were in the files section of teams. This is their true home – the
view you get in Teams is just that - a view, or window through which you can glimpse your
actual files here in SharePoint. Now on the left hand side, you have entirely
new navigation, which if you care to explore will take you to different places where your
files and assignments and class notebook and video recordings and student work are all
squirrelled away. For instance, if I tap on “site contents”, and then “class files”
and then “assignments”, you’ll find all your tasks you have set.
As fascinating as this all is, it’s not why I came here. So lets click on “pages”
and take a look there. Now you should find that there is already a page called “home”
in this folder, and if you open it up, you’ll find that your site already has a fairly decent
homepage that was auto generated when the site was made. However, this is not used at
all by Teams, so you probably didn’t even know it was here.
Now you could just use this as your homepage and add bits to this to customise it and make
it your own. But for some reason these autogenerated homepages don’t include a nice titlebar
that other webpages have, so personally I like to start with a new page and build it
from scratch myself. So lets go back to “pages” and click new
-> site pages, and we will get a nice blank page, but with a title bar that we can use
to build our homepage.
Firstly the title bar. Tap here to select an image to display. You’ll find a large
selection of “stock images”, or you can upload one of your own, or search bing for
one. Once you’ve found one you like, adjust the focal centre, and you can add a text banner
on top if you like. OK, now we have a nice title bar, we can add
some structure to the page where we can add our content. This little "+" sign here on the side
has a choice of different structure types, so you can have 1, 2 or 3 columns, or one
large and one small column. You can have different sections with different structures within
the same page, so coming back to my staffroom page, you can see I’ve got the one wide
and one narrow structure at the top of the page, then 3 columns for my videos, and then
2 columns and then 1 column for the calendar. Notice they have different background colours
too – this is also something you can pick when you create each section
Lets try adding the one wide, one narrow columns to start with here. So this is my wide column
on the left and narrow column on the right. I’m going to make this section light blue.
Notice I have these little plus symbols at the top of each column which I can use to
select various “webparts” to drop into the page. Scrolling down, you can see there
are lots of different webparts that I can use.
The text webpart is fairly self-explanatory – you can add plain text or headings to
your page and format it how you want. While I’m typing this in, I’ll just mention
that these webpages made via sharepoint are fully “responsive”. This means that pages
will optimally resize themselves on different size screens, so they still look great at
different resolutions and on an iPad or on a phone. So you don’t need to worry about
that sort of thing – its all handled for you.
Next up I’m going to use the “link” webpart to add a link to some websites we
often use. These are really great. I just place the webpart in the page, tap in the
url to the website, and sharepoint does the rest – turning it into a nice link along
with descriptive text and a photo scraped directly from that site. Boom. Job done.
If you want to place dynamic content in your webpage, then the “highlighted content”
webpart is an amazingly powerful “go fetch” tool, which you can just set and forget. Tell
it what you want, and every time someone loads the page, it will be populated with the most
recent content that matches your search criteria. I’m going to use it here to pull up all
my live lessons that have been saved to sharepoint. All my live lessons start with the word “live”,
so tapping that as the criteria is going to bring them all up. If you don’t have your
video recordings being saved to sharepoint yet, then I do highly recommend doing so – I
made a video about setting this up for your school here, so follow the link if you are interested.
You get a choice of different layouts for this webpart. You've got grid, list, carosel and film-strip.
I think film-strip looks about the best here.
And at the bottom, you've got some controls which you can use to limit the number of things that it will go and fetch.
So I've got mine set to 8.
And you can tick this box if you want the webpart to disappear if it doesnt manage to find anything at all.
Ok, that’s looking good. I’m still in
editing mode though, so to see it properly, I can “publish” the page at any time to
commit the changes I’ve been making. Looking good so far!
If your meeting recordings are still going to stream, then no problem. You can also fetch
videos from stream using the “stream” web-part. My school has some nice maths videos
on stream, so I’ll link to our maths channel by simply pasting its link here.
Adding videos from YouTube is also really easy. Just add a youtube webpart onto the
page, and paste in the link to the video you want it to display. So I can easily drop in
one of my maths videos from my YouTube channel, just by pasting the link in here.
Dont forget to replublish once you're done, so that your changes will be viewable by others.
Now there are a whole bunch of other useful webparts you can play around with to add more features to your pages, so feel free to try
some more out. I have another video that looks at other webparts you might like to try – I’ll link to it above.
Once you have your page looking how you want it to be, its time to add it into our group
in Teams. To do that, go back to your group in Teams, and tap on this “+” symbol up
here on the end of the tabs at the top.
Now there are lots of things you can add into
your groups, and I’ll maybe do a video on some more of these another time, but today
I’m going to be using the “sharepoint” add-in. Tapping that gives me a pop up where
I can choose what page from sharepoint I want to add. It is showing me a list of all the
pages from the linked sharepoint site, including the auto generated “home” one, plus my
new one I just made, so let’s pick that one. Press “save” and that’s it – your
page is now embedded in sharepoint and looking rather splendid.
Ok so we have looked at making a homepage in Microsoft Teams to highlight important
content you want your class or colleagues to see. It’s really easy once you know a
little bit about how SharePoint works. If you found this one useful, please do give
it a like by pressing the thumbs up below. If you want to find out more about using SharePoint,
check out this video I made with more tips on creating dynamic topic pages for your various
subject areas by clinking over here ->, or click on one these other thumbnails for more
great edtech videos. See you on the next one!