Hello and welcome to Mr Tompkins Edtech. It’s the summer holiday and whilst I don’t like
to spend too much of my free time thinking about school, it pays to do a little bit of
housekeeping with our digital classrooms over the break.
Whether you are carrying on with the same classes, or teaching the same course to a
new group, or starting something completely new, this video will help you hit the ground
running, ready for the start of the new school year.
I’ll be showing you: how to archive your existing teams from last
year, explaining what exactly this means for you and why this really is the best way to
wrap things up. I’ll show you how you can access these archived
groups again in the future, in case you want to go dig something up or even fully restore
them. We’ll see how to move or copy your existing
folders and files over from your old groups into your new groups, and also discuss what
cant be moved and what we can do about this. I’ll briefly discuss strategies around managing
your linked OneNote Class Notebooks, although I’ll be spinning this out in much more detail
in its own separate video coming soon. At the end of the video, I’ll explain how
admins can use School Data Sync to archive all the previous year’s class groups for
the entire school, saving everyone else the work.
This video has been sponsored by Microsoft Partners and my good friends at Satchel, makers
of Satchel One which is home to “Show My Homework”, now being used in 1 in 3 secondary
schools in the UK. Towards the end of the video I’ll be showing you some of their new productivity tools
that integrate seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and Teams, which know you will find very interesting, so do stick around for that.
For many teachers, this last academic year would have been the first time they actively
used Microsoft Teams with their classes, and they may be wondering what happens to all
the stuff they have shared via teams over the course of this year. If that’s you then
fear not – I’m going to walk you through it.
Just like your real classroom, there will be resources you definitely want to keep on
using, some things that need to be filed away just in case, and lots of stuff that you just don’t need
anymore. In Teams, you might have posts and conversation threads between you and your
students, resources/handouts/worksheets you’ve shared, homeworks and assignments you’ve
set, and video lessons you’ve recorded. Some of this you will definitely want to keep,
some of it you might later decide to reuse so you just want to hang on to it for now,
but a lot of it is just digital detritus that you’ll never look at again and don’t want
cluttering up your shiny new online classroom. Hands down the easiest way of doing this is
to archive your existing team, create a new team group for your new class, and move over
the stuff you definitely want to keep from the old group into the new one. Anything you’re
not sure about can just sit in the archived team, tucked out of sight, but easily accessible
if you suddenly decide that you do need to retrieve something from it.
To archive a team, you first need to tap this cog up in the top right corner of teams, and
select “manage teams”. This will bring up a list of teams you are a member of, divided
into “active” and “archived” teams. If you have never archived any teams before
(and your school doesn’t do this for you), then you’ll just have a list of active teams
for now. To archive a team, simply tap the 3 epsilons
at the end of its row and select “archive team”. Now you can only do this with teams
you are listed as an owner for. If you are just a member, then this option will be missing.
Once done, your team will disappear from the active list and reappear in the archive list.
If you change your mind, you can reverse this process, simply by expanding the archive list,
finding the team, tap on the 3 epsilons, and then “restore team”. So all very quick
and simple to do.
What exactly happens when you archive a team, you might be asking?
Well firstly and most obviously, it’s tile disappears off your main teams view, and also
off your students view and anyone else who is a member of that team. So archiving all
your old groups is going to unclutter things ready for the new year and allow your new
groups to take centre stage. As you cant see them anymore on your main
teams view, if you do want to open them, you will need to click on the cog again, go down
to your archived groups and click on it in this list.
They still open up the same way and it will appear exactly the same and contain all the
same resources and posts that were there when you archived it. You’ll notice you get this
new banner up here telling you the group is archived and you cant make new posts.
And that’s the other main change – the group is mothballed, so you cant add anything
new to it. But the advantage of archiving over deleting
your old team, is that you can always go back and reuse stuff at a later date.
Additionally all your old assignments can be used to cookie-cut a new assignment for
a new group, which can save you a lot of time. Students will also continue to have access
to their turned-in assignments and grades in case they need to refer back to them.
If you use the class notebook, and you really should as it's awesome, then you can use the
old notebook in an archived team as a template for creating new ones in your new teams.
Also students will continue to be able to access their old class notebooks, which they
wouldn’t be able to if you had simply deleted the old team. As class notebooks are held
as a resource within the group, deleting the group will delete the class notebook too,
and this may contain the students own work too. So best to be avoided.
Creating a new team based on an old one When creating your new team, first click on
this “Join or create team” button up here, “create team”, and select the “class”
option if this is going to be a class group. Notice you have this “create a team using
an existing team as a template” option down here. Tapping on that gives you a list of
all your teams, both active and archived, so you can pick out last year’s archived
team to help you get started. It’s not going to bring over resources from the previous
team, but you can bring over the structure, so all the channels, tabs, settings and apps
that you had added, along with the class list of students if you want to. Just tick or untick
anything you want or don’t want to bring over. So if I’m carrying on with the same
class, I can easily make a year 11 group with the same look and feel as the old year 10
group this way. Once that’s done and you have recreated
your team, you might decide you need to bring over some of the content from last year’s
group into the new group. I’ve already mentioned that old assignments
can be reused as templates when creating new ones. Similarly when you create your class
notebook, you can use your old notebook as a template and bring over any sections you
want to include from the outset. (You can always bring over more later if you are not
sure). I’m going to do a separate video on managing class notebooks from year to year,
so keep an eye out for that. If you are not yet subscribed, why not do that now and hit
the bell. That way you’ll be notified when it comes out.
You can also bring over all your files and folders from the old group. First navigate
to your old archived group, via the cog,manage teams, into the archived teams and click on
the one you want. Go to the Files tab and then on the document or folder you want to
move over. For individual files, you can simply select
one or more file and then tap the move or copy buttons up here at the top. This will
give you a pop-up dialog box where you can navigate to their new home. You’ll have
you use this up arrow first to get you to the list of all your teams, and then drill
down into whatever folder you want the files to be moved or copied to and then press the
move/copy button to do the deed. Folders are a little bit trickier, as the
move/copy button doesn’t show up in teams when you select them. But they can also be
moved if you first tap this “open in sharepoint” button first. You may or may not know much
about sharepoint, but its where teams actually stores all its files and folders, and going
over to sharepoint where your files actually live is going to give you lots more options.
Notice its taken me to a sharepoint webpage, showing me the same files and folders that
I can see in Teams. Here you are able to select an entire folder and then hit these 3 dots
to move or copy it where you want it to go. The interface is a bit different – you get
this pop-out side panel instead, where you should be able to locate your new group. You’ll
want to navigate into the “documents” and then the “general” folder within that
group (or the channel name if you have multiple channels in the team) and then move/copy your
folders over. So what cant be moved over from an old group
into a new one. Well firstly, any conversations you’ve had with students in the posts section
cannot be moved, although any files you attached to those posts you can move over from the
files section. The other thing you cant move is your grade
book. If you have made assignments in the old team and applied grades to them, you cant
bring the marks or grades over. You can however export them to excel, and so you can easily
pull these into an emarkbook or departmental spreadsheet if you have one of these.
The other things you cant bring over is usage data from the insights tab. Again, you can
export this information to excel if you do want to keep track of it in future years.
You can also always go back to your archived groups and look at these things if you need
to, but they cant be merged into the new groups in teams, and so both the gradebook and the
class insights are going to be a fresh slate for the new academic year. This is no biggie
for me – its what I’d want it to be anyway.
If you are interested, at the end of this
video I’ll show you how your school can save you all a job and use school data sync
to archive all class teams for everyone automatically, ready for the new year, so you don’t have
to. So stick around for that.
First though, lets hear a bit about this video’s Sponsor, Satchel One:
If your school is planning on using Microsoft
Teams a lot with students this year, then you’ll want to check out Satchel One’s
award winning suite of productivity tools designed specifically for education; the best
known being “Show My Homework”, used in 1 in 3 secondary schools across the UK . Over
the last 18 months, Team Satchel have been improving the features of all their tools,
so that it works seamlessly with Microsoft 365, and has become a complimentary tool to
Microsoft Teams, adding to and enhancing key features that make it work much better in
a school setting. They’ve recently also become Microsoft Partners and will be looking
to deepen their existing integrations with Microsoft over the coming months.
Show-My-Homework can massively improve student engagement with online assessments or homework
tasks by ensuring parents and students are better informed on what has been set and what
students have handed in. Real-time notifications sent direct to mobile devices keeps everyone
in the loop. Assessments can directly utilise the teacher’s
OneDrive, allowing them to simply attach and share homework templates that they have created
in Word OR Powerpoint. Students can work on their own digital copy at home or in school
and submit these electronically. Teachers are then able to review, feedback and grade
this work seamlessly, all from one interface, creating a dialog of their interactions with
the student as they go, that parents can review, and which clearly evidence the learning journey
as students uplevel and improve their work. Other great apps in the Satchel One toolkit
include a web-based attendance, behaviour and rewards system and tracking tool that
will write back to SIMS whilst also keeping parents informed. There’s also data rich
automated seating plans to reduce teachers workload, and easy access to Collins online
textbooks across all core subjects that can be assigned as homeworks and used by students
at home or in school. Satchel One offers full single-sign-on access
to all these tools with existing office 365 or google accounts, so no additional usernames
or passwords to remember or maintain.
Whilst we are hopefully coming to the end of lockdowns and home learning, working electronically
with the students, and setting and submitting homeworks and assignments online is here to
stay. Satchel One now integrates with both Microsoft Teams and Google Classroom, and
compliments both, so if you want the very best online experience for the teachers, students
and parents at your school then share this video with your leadership team, or if this
is you, then simply follow this link, which you’ll also find in the description below,
and book yourself a free demo. Satchel are also offering a free 30 day trial of their
learning platform for anyone interested, make sure you quote Mr Tompkins Edtech when enquiring!
Finally, lets look at how we can make the
end of year process a bit easier for teaching staff. If you have access to an admin account,
you can use school data sync to archive all your school’s class teams at the end of
the year, ready for creating new ones.
Simply go to the SDS website and log in with an admin account, go to “People” tab and
then tap on memberships. The first thing you’ll need to do is run an up to date “group report”
by tapping here and selecting “generate new report” from the pop-out side panel.
This might take a few seconds to run. You’ll have to close the side panel and reopen it
a minute or two later to get the updated group report to show up. Download the report using
this button here. It’s a CSV file, so open it up in excel.
You should find a long list of all your active and archived teams, which may be quite long
if you have been using teams for a few years. Scan through the list and delete any rows
containing teams you don’t want to archive. Once you are happy with the list, save your
changes and go back to SDS. This time tap on “group clean-up”, “select group report”,
re-upload the edited CSV file and press “next”. The process can take a bit of time to run
– maybe an hour or so if you have a lot of groups, but once it’s finished, all the
old groups will have been archived. Don’t forget to alert your staff about what you’ve
done to avoid mass panic, and you might also want to share this video, or a much shorter
2 minute guide to archiving groups in teams, so they know how to find their old teams again
if they need to. Ok, that really is all we have time for in
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