Microsoft Teams - Anyone using in a school environment?

[SimonInOz]

Looking for advice on how to manage it with students. We spent a lot of time locking down Skype, just wondering what is best practice in rolling this out in a school so it can be used, but not abused...

[StoneGroup_JackW]

Good Morning Simon, please see below a bit more information regarding teams and its functions within a school environment. Microsoft Teams comes with its own separate Admin centre which gives increased control outside of the settings and policies found in the application itself. Policies can be made that will lock down the chat function for designated user groups, block gif sending and also the collaboration space. However although it might seem sensible to restrict this functionality, it will also take away some of the benefits of using teams which is designed to be a collaboration tool. When used appropriately it can teach students to communicate and collaborate on work, answer each other’s questions and also teach them responsibility of their digital footprint online as you can prevent posts and comments from being deleted so students are accountable.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Best-practices-for-school-leaders-creating-teams-and-channels-in-Microsoft-Teams-for-Education-f3663ad9-a835-4971-9acb-6725a543c003

If you have any further questions feel free to drop me a message. Jack

[GPeckss]

I would be interested to see how other schools have gone about the deployment of this.

We have got Windows 10 machines installed across our site, with Teams being deployed via GPO.

This has worked fine, and is also linked with our AD/Azure sync meaning it auto logs in, one issue we are having is with the Notifications.

We have found that when direct messaging another member of staff there is now way to have the text of the message hidden from the notification, this means that if a member of SLT is communicating with a teacher in a class, the messages are being displayed to the whole class due to this. Turning off notifications all together will not work as there would no way of knowing when a message is received.

Another issue is with trying to get it pinned to the task bar via GPO. If anyone has any recommendations on how to do this or if they have done it, can you share your knowledge?

 

-GPecks

[kennysarmy]

I'm yet to be convinced of it's real usefulness in our environment.

 

We really heavily on our Firefly VLE.

 

My worry it would just be another thing staff don't have time to learn.

[robyholmes]

We use it here combined with Microsoft SDS (School Data Sync). It creates teams for all our classes allowing staff to email, IM, share files and set assignments per class. Each subject or department around school also has a team and we're growing the number of teams as we find a set of work which requires it.

 

As for management, we've done the following:

• Student policy created blocking private chats & calls
  
• Student can't create new teams
  
• All teams have at least one staff member, with the idea that they monitor it
  
• Microsoft provide great monitoring tools via the Security & Compliance Center. We've setup some monitoring rules as well which check teams content.
  
• 
  

 

Most staff simply use the groups for emailing but we have a few staff who are fully using teams to store files, chat and set homework.

[SimonInOz]

Thanks Roby (and other responders). Are you able to point me to information on how you set it up for things like assignments, etc? I also need to know how to log conversations, share files etc. Cheers

[SimonInOz]

Thanks Jack, I will certainly send you a msg. Thanks for the link, much appreciated. Any documentation, particularly workflow/checklists would be appreciated.

[free780]

I would be interested to see how other schools have gone about the deployment of this.

We have got Windows 10 machines installed across our site, with Teams being deployed via GPO.

This has worked fine, and is also linked with our AD/Azure sync meaning it auto logs in, one issue we are having is with the Notifications.

We have found that when direct messaging another member of staff there is now way to have the text of the message hidden from the notification, this means that if a member of SLT is communicating with a teacher in a class, the messages are being displayed to the whole class due to this. Turning off notifications all together will not work as there would no way of knowing when a message is received.

Another issue is with trying to get it pinned to the task bar via GPO. If anyone has any recommendations on how to do this or if they have done it, can you share your knowledge?

 

-GPecks

The teaching staff could extend the display instead of clone so you don't display the notifications on the non primary monitor.

 

The pinning might be possible by using the start menu layout but you'd probably have to target in the user context. Teams installs in the user context.

[MartinT]

We've rolled out Teams since August. The take-up and acceptance has been impressive - there are 250 Teams as of yesterday. A mixture of Class and Staff Teams.

 

Since we are phasing out Firefly, and decommissioning our file server, I have spent every day migrating data into Teams or SharePoint. We're very nearly done, with the bottom of the barrel rubbish left to sort through and move or delete, as appropriate. As classroom tools, Teams and OneNote are superb and all the students have Teams installed on their laptops and phones. Streams is good for our video content, too.

[cscott]

We're using it within an FE College very successfully.

 

We hold half-termly FE learner forums, class reps from every 16-18 year old course, they've given good feedback on Teams, much prefer it to our VLE.

 

Growth has been organic, delivered training on how to use it to teaching staff and let them decided if they want to use it - currently got about 400 active Teams

[Ditto]

Would it be a fair conclusion that MS Teams, O365, OneNote, Sharepoint et. al. can be used to create an excellent educational collaboration and learning platform? For me, it appears so, but the challenge is setting it up well, using the best tool(s) for it to work well. From experience, the G Suite platform, especially with Classroom, offer something similar, but it comes across as being much simpler to get going. I have this nagging feeling MS could be functionally richer, but MS need to provide a template or best practice guidance to get schools moving in the right direction.

[cscott]

Teams incldues a "class" template, which you can tweak and customise to fit your environment. MS also have a load of resources here https://preview.education.microsoft.com/en-us

[kennysarmy]

We've rolled out Teams since August. The take-up and acceptance has been impressive - there are 250 Teams as of yesterday. A mixture of Class and Staff Teams.

 

Since we are phasing out Firefly, and decommissioning our file server, I have spent every day migrating data into Teams or SharePoint. We're very nearly done, with the bottom of the barrel rubbish left to sort through and move or delete, as appropriate. As classroom tools, Teams and OneNote are superb and all the students have Teams installed on their laptops and phones. Streams is good for our video content, too.

 

Any reason for phasing out Firefly? Our staff, students and parents seem to be fully engaged with it.

[supportman]

We use it as well school wide as our VLE, its the best VLE we have had so far and we've had a few over the years

 

We use SDS (ruler.co.uk to create the CSV files each month) to auto create all the groups

We have a student and staff policy with private chat disabled for students

We disable Gifs and stickers for students and staff

Its all relatively easy to setup and doesn't take long.

We also use it as our homework system. You can check a nice video here on how it works:

 

 

One day hoping to use it for our phone system as well...

[supportman]

Most staff simply use the groups for emailing but we have a few staff who are fully using teams to store files, chat and set homework.

Can you email office groups now? I'm sure this didn't used to be possible and we setup separate distribution lists...

[robyholmes]

Can you email office groups now? I'm sure this didn't used to be possible and we setup separate distribution lists...

 

Depends on the setting. You need the 'Send copies to members' option ticked. I think this is set in SDS as I don't need to do it per class.

[MartinT]

Any reason for phasing out Firefly? Our staff, students and parents seem to be fully engaged with it.

 

Apart from some members of staff, I would say we never got full engagement with Firefly. We don't have parent access either. It's been used as a glorified file repository, which Teams and SharePoint easily replace, and only a few staff use assignments, which Class Teams fully replace. Those staff have quickly moved over to Teams and OneNote of their own volition.

 

That leaves the VLE pages, which I am yet to decide on how to move to SharePoint.

 

Firefly is way too expensive and I get the idea that development has slowed down considerably. When we pay for Microsoft 365, which we need, why should we pay for Firefly too when all of its functions are well served by the MS suite already? That's been my justification and it has been accepted by everyone so far.

[butlerad]

Hi all,

 

We too have rolled it out across multiple schools with a fair amount of success, it seems Microsoft are tweaking Teams very regularly and new features/settings come available all the time.

 

We have also locked down chat, as always the students have found a way. They are still able to set their status and @ users through there

 

 

Anyone aware of this get around and has anyone managed to lock it down?

 

Thanks in advance.

[MartinT]

No, we allow chat but have disabled Skype calling which really irritated teachers.

[butlerad]

Loads of good stuff here for anyone thinking of rolling out. Includes Edu specific guides, Microsoft documentation (actually quite good), How to set policies on mass via powershell (currently the hardest step) and granting created polices on mass. I saved all these links for a reason.

 

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/microsoftteams/teams-overview

 

https://practical365.com/collaboration/teams/using-powershell-to-apply-messaging-policies-to-teams-users/

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/powershell/module/skype/grant-csteamsmessagingpolicy?view=skype-ps

[Joko]

I'm in the middle of the roll out and have become stuck on a problem. SLT are wanting group chat to be turned off by default, which is impossible to do according to M$. Are you allowing your teachers to moderate the chat themselves? I know teachers can turn off chat manually for groups - although once SIMS does a push and creates more classrooms, i feel this could get out of hand, quite quickly.

 

Thanks!

[supportman]

I'm in the middle of the roll out and have become stuck on a problem. SLT are wanting group chat to be turned off by default, which is impossible to do according to M$. Are you allowing your teachers to moderate the chat themselves? I know teachers can turn off chat manually for groups - although once SIMS does a push and creates more classrooms, i feel this could get out of hand, quite quickly.

 

Thanks!

 

We just disabled chat for all students, there is no need for it when they can use the class teams.

[Joko]

We just disabled chat for all students, there is no need for it when they can use the class teams.

This is the problem i'm having. They don't even want the chat in class teams.

[robyholmes]

This is the problem i'm having. They don't even want the chat in class teams.

 

Do you allow your students access to email? If so that's basically chat in Teams. In fact, in the back end of things like Security and Compliance you'll find that chat messages appear in content searches appear as emails.

[supportman]

This is the problem i'm having. They don't even want the chat in class teams.

 

That's really strange though, its a communication system and you want to disable the communication part? Its the equivalent of not allowing students to ask questions in class

 

In our school each class has a Microsoft Team, the teacher of that class is responsible for the content in that team.