Saturday, December 28, 2019

Don’t Leave Teams in the Cloud

Microsoft Office 365 is a popular cloud-based technology known most for its productivity apps, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In addition to these applications (apps), Microsoft Office 365 offers other applications and services that could potentially transform the teaching and learning environment for educators. Microsoft Teams, a less popular app in the Microsoft Office 365 collection, is a safe and secure platform to create inclusive, student-centered instruction and learning opportunities.

Microsoft Teams is a digital hub with a seamless platform that permits educators to create a space for communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.  Utilizing Teams, educators are able to add content, assignments, and posts, while bringing to one location other apps such as OneNote and Stream. Further, students can hold conversations with the Teams app.

With Microsoft Teams, educators can build a collaborative classroom. Teams serves as a hub where educators and students interact online and as a workspace for communications, sharing files and even meeting online. Within Teams, educators set up a class made up of channels. Each channel is dedicated to a topic. Students work on assigned tasks within a channel. Teams allows educators to share the students’ feedback individually or directly with the group. If feedback is shared with the group, students can use the feedback for further discussion online or personally during a face-to-face class session.

In addition to using Teams for communication and collaboration, educators can empower students through personalized assignments and individual feedback. Educators can manage assignments using Teams to create, assign, collect, and provide feedback on assignments. Further, rubrics gained popularity with educators as a means of communicating expectations for an assignment, assessing student work, and grading final papers/projects. Teams embodies a system that all study materials, assignments, and feedback are in one place and easily accessible online from different devices.

Zacharová and Sokolová (2019) used Microsoft Teams in a classroom management course for pre-service teachers. Study materials, including case students, worksheets, and problem-based tasks are all a part of Teams. Students worked at their own pace and chose when and how long they worked on the assignments. Teams supports a system of interactive engagement for teachers and students. Students watched videos and used the chat room to share ideas and comments. The instructors provided feedback to students.

In conclusion, think of Microsoft Teams as a digital hub to bring educators, students, applications, conversations, assignments, and feedback together in one location. More importantly, educators and students have free access to Microsoft Office 365 through their academic institution or directly through Microsoft (Simkin, 2018). Students can work on group projects and hold discussions related to assignments. Educators can monitor how things are going in each group. Also, assignment submissions and feedback take place in a seamless environment. Microsoft Teams can change the way teaching and learning happens.
                                                                                     
References:

Simkin, M. (2018). Embedding technology in the history classroom. Agora, 53(1), 17–20.

Zacharová & Sokolová (2019). Developing professional vision: An on-line course of Adlerian classroom management for pre-service teachers. ELearning & Software for Education, 2, 79–84. doi:10.12753/2066-026X-19-079

Cite this blog: Washington, G. (2019, December 28). Don’t Leave Teams in the Cloud [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://pedagogybeforetechnology.blogspot.com/