- OK, so my little session today that I'm gonna be running
is about collaboration in teams.
Now, in terms of collaboration,
I just think that that is a word that's really driving
some of the change that I wanna see in my students.
Being able to collaborate in better ways
than they previously had before.
And, of course, we have some amazing tools
that we have available now to enable that.
So the one that I'm gonna be speaking about
today, good morning, is Microsoft Teams.
I'm the Head of ICT Integration at All Saints College.
I think the slides are up here.
And it's my job to help with kids and with the staff
on developing this.
Developing collaboration,
and a number of different other things,
that I'm, talking about in another session.
But, really focusing today on what teams can,
collaborative development.
So, why Microsoft Teams?
I love Teams, and this is kinda going through the reasons
why I really like Microsoft Teams.
It really is about, because we're bringing together
a number of disparate products that we all use
a lot of the time,
and bringing them together in one thing.
So, we've got Outlook.
Now, we all know email, or use email a lot.
Outlook is kind of the foundation product
that we use to do emails.
So with conversations in Teams and chat in Teams,
that kind of replaces that,
and that's what we're trying to do.
I heard someone yesterday talk about
an email the school internally.
That would be pretty cool,
'cause I don't know if your life's driven by email,
but mine is.
Skype.
Calling features.
Being able to call and communicate and chat
with people over Skype is really awesome.
You've got OneNote,
we all know about OneNote and the power of OneNote
and the collaborative developments in OneNote.
It's a tool unlike anything else I've used in the classroom,
fantastic, I love it.
And all of our teachers use OneNote fantastically.
And also OneDrive.
So, being able to store and share files.
So think of all these different things
that I use a lot in my Microsoft ecosystem,
all of those in one place, in Microsoft Teams.
That's awesome, and that's why I love this product,
why I've really made an effort for our school community,
to say, "Hey, get on board with using Microsoft Teams."
OK, so, first of all, I wanna start with Conversations.
Conversations in Teams.
You can see them all happening in one place.
They're kind of more social, so for students,
they're very much used to this social thing,
a threaded conversation,
they're still really functional, though,
so you can still add attachments.
Students love emojis,
you can do memes, you can do all kinds of things
in the conversation space in Teams
that students normally will not do in an email.
So I've found, that as I've tried to transition my class
to using Teams from email,
some rich and cool things are going on
that haven't been goin on before.
Meetings in Teams.
Very cool.
So here's an example of the conversations going on,
for those of you who haven't seen Teams.
So you can see there at the bottom,
if I wanna start a new conversation,
I can, attachments,
I've got the little emoji character going.
I can do all kinds of things with my conversations in Teams,
that you could do with email as well,
but it's a different thing.
Meetings.
Have a look here at the Meetings section in Teams.
So you're gonna get your full Meetings experience
that you normally could.
You can create meetings that are right on the fly,
or you can do something called Meet Now.
So, I'm showing you now what it looks like to meet now
with your team.
So if people are still offsite,
and we often have this at our school with our team.
People might be away at certain times,
so they can meet, they can join this meeting
from many different places, from Outlook.
And now we're in a meeting.
That's not me, someone else joining a meeting.
So, I can mute my mic.
The meeting can be going on
with different people inside the team.
I can turn off the camera if I want to
and just have one person talking at a time.
While I'm involved in that meeting, I can share a screen.
Or anybody in that meeting is able to share their screen.
So this allows, from, to have conversations,
which is fantastic,
if you're not all in the same place at the same time.
You can record your meeting.
That meeting then gets recorded
and sits in your team's space,
so that you can review the meeting later.
Especially for the people who weren't able to go.
So, I find that the Meeting section in Teams is awesome.
And, again, it all happens in the same place,
in the Conversation section in Teams.
You can invite other people to the meeting.
By default, anyone in that team is able to jump in
and join that call.
But you can have chats while the call is going on
with emojis and all of that sort of thing.
I love the Meeting Space in Teams,
it's really, really cool.
You can minimize the call as well,
so you can go back to your full experience
that you're used to seeing in Teams
that can be minimized, and then you can make that
bigger and smaller again,
you can share files.
All of that stuff can be going on all on the same place.
And then we're leaving the call.
And that call then can be saved,
which is really awesome.
OK, so Meetings in Teams allows you to collaborate
again, in ways that is really cool
that I haven't seen going on before.
You can also use Microsoft Whiteboard,
so, if you're not familiar with Whiteboard,
Whiteboard is really, really cool.
So, this is an example of, in a call, in a meeting,
collaborating in the Whiteboard app,
and being able to use that, which is really cool.
The Calendar.
So you've got this full calendar experience coming out
with Teams really soon.
So rather than just a mini-calendar,
that has your appointments,
all of your calendar items in Outlook
will come into one place,
which is really, really cool.
So it's gonna be looking like that.
And that is gonna be coming in Teams really soon.
The thing that I love also,
to collaborate on files in teams.
So with the Files section in Teams,
you get a great structure,
so can have folders within folders within folders.
Like you're normally used to.
You can also collaborate together on those folders.
You can sync all of those files and folders to your PC,
get links to documents
and share them with other team members,
or share them externally.
You can create Word documents,
Excel documents, PowerPoint documents,
in that files section, so you don't have to just import them
and drag them in.
They can be created directly in there.
And you can upload and store large files.
So my group students that I'm working with,
we're working on a video project,
I create a folder in Teams
and that's where all of their work goes.
And that's just a great place, again.
So rather than having a folder in OneDrive,
which we could use,
all of our stuff is in Teams.
Everybody can see it,
everyone can collaborate on those files.
Which is great.
I just wanna show you an image of
what it looks like in Teams.
So this is my Innovate[Ed] year eight 2019 group.
This is just one part of the Files section.
You can see that first folder there,
which is brand new and just appeared,
is called Class.
That is anything that I put in there is read-only
for the students.
So, normally all the files in there are able to be edited
by anyone on the team, which is great.
So the Word document you can see there at the bottom,
"Quizzes", anyone on the team can collaborate
on that document,
they can open it in Word, work on it,
it gets saved back to the team.
Awesome.
So we can collaborate on those.
But some files and some folders, the teacher said,
"Man, oh, maybe I don't want the students
"to be able to collaborate on."
They can put that in the Class Materials folder,
That becomes read-only by default, which is really cool.
There's the same folder I'm now looking at an Explorer view.
A normal view that people are used to.
And you'll notice that the files are exactly the same.
So I can sync everything that I have in my team
to my computer, works really, really seamlessly.
So teachers and students that are used to working within
their File Explorer window can do that and sync that
to their computer as well.
Anything that I put in this folder here,
will automatically sync back to my team.
Really works really seamlessly, it's great.
So files and collaborating on files is awesome in Teams.
You can have guests involved in your team.
So imagine bringing in a guest speaker,
or a guest presenter,
or a guest to be part of your team that you're working with.
We've done that in my class,
asked an ex-student who is an engineering student,
"Hey, can you come in and mentor some of our students
"around the work that they're doing?"
We just added him to our team.
He had access to all of our materials.
He was able to jump into the conversations,
it was really, really cool to have a guest speaker
as part of the team,
more authentically than just bringing him to the classroom.
He actually came to the classroom,
but he also was able to have an ongoing conversation
with my students which is really cool.
We all know, well,
hopefully we all know what OneNote does in my class.
So I'm able to share, and the feedback loop with OneNote
is unlike anything else I've ever used with my students.
You know, so I can annotate on their work,
they can get that straight away.
I can leave voice comments,
I can even leave a little video.
Saying "Hey, great stuff there."
Whatever, and that all syncs up perfectly in OneNote.
So, OneNote lives inside Teams.
So here's a view of one of the teams that I'm involved in.
You can see that OneNote lives withinside that team.
Some students prefer that to open that OneNote
In the normal OneNote app and work from it from there.
Fine.
A lot of people just use OneNote from directly within Teams.
It sits there seamlessly, it comes as part of the team
and you get all the benefits of that.
And lastly, you can control all the permissions
of what kind of collaboration you wanna have going on.
So, if you want the members of the team to be able to
create and update channels, or not, you can choose that.
So there is a lot of options that you get
with how people in your teams can interact
and the way that you want them to interact.
Either as guests, or as people that are members of the team.
So in this case here, I'm saying,
"Anyone can post on the team, anyone can collaborate,
"and join in that team,"
but we probably just wanna give you a message that,
"Hey, this message is going out to 150 students."
Or whatever.
Or in some teams, it might just be the owners of the teams
that can post messages.
But for my class team,
I love the collaboration and the back and forth
in the conversations that I get
through the conversation space in Teams.
And I actually really encourage my students
to get going on that.
I actually demand them to get going.
So, I'll put up a post and I say,
"Hey, please, I want you to comment
"and start answering questions, in this comment thread."
And what happens, the magic that happens,
is that students start asking questions and it's not me
that starts answering the question, it's other students.
So that can happen outside of the classroom.
I want my classroom to not just be,
you know, for that 50 minutes during the day.
I want it to happen over the course of the day,
or whenever my students wanna participate.
So Teams is the hub that allows that and makes that happen.