microsoft teams meetings are a great way to collaborate with others and in this video i'll
show you seven tips that i really like to use in order to make those meetings even more effective
microsoft teams can be used in both a windows and a mac environment in this video i'm going to
demonstrate using the windows interface if you're a mac user check the card up above because i've
done the same video using the mac interface tip number one for microsoft teams meetings begins
before the meeting even starts one of the things i recommend is that instead of scheduling the
meeting by clicking start meeting i always go to the calendar and i schedule my meetings in advance
even if i'm only going to have a meeting five minutes from now now i talk about webinars and
live events in some other videos here on the channel you can check out the video on eight
tips for microsoft teams for more on that but here i'm going to go into scheduling a meeting when i
schedule the meeting let's create a meeting about bear activity so we want to make sure
that we have a discussion around bear activity on our hike i can add in required attendees so
let's go ahead and make bruce wayne one of my required attendees here and i can do things
like set it up to repeat now as a tip this is nothing new but there's a reason for this
if i go in i can add it to a specific channel so we'll go ahead and put up meetings about bears
and i'll go ahead and send this this will now put it into my calendar this leads to tip number two
tip number two now that i've used the calendar to schedule my meeting instead of just starting
the meeting i can actually go in and make a number of changes here so for example
i can now get the meetings linked from here i get a lot of detailed activity but even more important
up here i can go in and i can use breakout rooms and with the breakout rooms i can plan
these in advance this allows me to create the breakout rooms before the meeting even starts
so that when i start the meeting they'll be available to me i can choose the number of
breakout rooms that i want so i'll just choose two for this demonstration i'll add that in
now when i create these breakout rooms you'll notice that right now they're room one and
room two that's not very inspiring so i can go ahead and edit these and we'll call this one
bear spray so we're going to have a breakout room to discuss bear spray
and then we're going to have a second breakout room i'll edit this one here and we'll make this
cardio training now i'm just going to say please don't run from bears it's not a good idea
they will chase you well they don't always chase you anyways that this this channel is
about microsoft teams not about hiking anyhow but don't run from bears so if we have a look
here you can notice here that underneath here i've got zero participants in here i can assign
participants from anybody that i brought into this meeting so anybody that's a required or optional
attendee for the meeting will appear across here i can assign that participant automatically or i
can prepare these in advance and maybe bruce wayne i want to make sure that he's assigned
to the cardio training i mean after all he is batman he knows a lot about personal training
so there you go i can pre-assign my participants and really get this meeting ready to go so tip one
was to use the calendar to schedule the meeting and tip two is go in and prepare the meeting in
advance things like breakout rooms we're going to come back later on in one of the other tips where
we'll talk about how the other benefit of using the calendar to schedule a meeting is that we can
come back for attendance let's go ahead and join the meeting and look at some of the other tips
tip number three so now i've got myself and bruce in the meeting together i'm going to go to more
and i'm going to turn on live captions with live captions what i'm going to be able to do
is i'm going to be able to see everything that i'm saying if i go over to bruce he's not seeing that
he would have to go in and turn on live captions as well now everything
i say will be attributed to me everything that bruce says will be attributed to him
now in this particular video i actually have two microphones the computers are near each other
so the attribution may not work perfectly but there is an additional feature that's kind of
interesting underneath my icon here this is me if i hit the ellipse this one here will allow
me to spotlight or pin but notice there's a second ellipse in that second ellipse
i can change my spoken language so if i go to for example german i'll confirm that
and now everything that bruce says will be translated into german so i can have my german
here this is attributed to me and you can see that as bruce talks it's translated to german
now as a caution here it's not absolutely very great so the translation is so so so be a little
bit careful of that but it is something that might help people that have english as a second language
it might be something that is useful in your environment it's definitely something that we want
to stay tuned to that will become very useful as the translation quality improves tip number four
if i go into the ellipse here i can change meeting options now many of these options are available
for your it administrator to set up to be in one state or another so for example by default
in my meetings i have the mic for attendees and i allow the camera for attendees but notice i'm not
recording automatically and notice i am allowing reactions let's say i don't want reactions
if i choose this and click save i've now disabled reactions for this meeting the reactions are now
no longer available and if i go into bruce here and he attempts to react he's not able to react
if i go back and turn reactions back on i now can go in and i can do my reactions so i can
see the reactions that are available they are now available to me and bruce is able to go in and
able to do reactions as well tip number five is very handy if you have a lot of people in meeting
if you go into the more menu you can actually put a gallery of people at the top
this will put a number of people here at the top and what you can always do is spotlight for
yourself or so i'll spotlight everybody for myself so now i'm spotlighted so now you can see that
i'm spotlighted you could choose anybody in the gallery here and you can see here that on bruce's
computer i'm spotlighted that's really great if you're presenting and you have a lot of attendees
and you want to highlight who's presenting at a specific time you can use that feature tip number
six you can go in and you can mute people as well you can mute the participant so if i've muted
bruce he's now muted from the meeting and if we go in you can see that he's notified that he's muted
now he could go in here and he could unmute himself and we could have a little bit of a battle
here so what you can do is you can go into the menu here and underneath your meeting options you
could go through and you could say we're going to hide the mic or you're not allowed to have the mic
and now bruce is not going to be able if he tries to unmute himself his microphone is not going to
work so if bruce tries to speak he won't be heard because he has been muted and you don't have to
go in and highlight him or mute him here the microphone basically is not working for anybody
now once we leave this meeting so i'm going to leave this meeting i'll even end this meeting
here as the organizer this is one of the reasons why we wanted to go in and we wanted to have our
meeting in the calendar if i go into this meeting now i can go into edit this meeting
and you can see that i now have an attendance report so i'm able to go in with the attendance
report and i can see everybody that participated in this meeting how long they participated what
their role was and i can even drill down and i can see here that bruce was here for the whole meeting
if he leaves and comes back i'll have a list of when he left and when he came back
so i have a good understanding of who is in my meeting you can even download this so that you can
use this for things like attendance i hope those seven tips will make your microsoft teams meetings
even more effective if this video is useful like it and subscribe if you want more tips
on how we can use technology for learning and teaching i also have a couple videos on how we
can work with the microsoft teams environment so there's some videos here on tips that you can use
in microsoft teams thank you so much for watching we'll see you in the next video