SIMS and Office 365 Groups

[mdwheeler]

Dear All,

 

As we frantically move to online learning I have a couple of questions/checking my understanding, hopefully somebody might be able to help.

 

We have done the self-onboarding to link SIMS and O365. My understanding is this creates O365 Sharepoint Groups for each class. I can indeed see these groups via sharepoint (although we seem to have some duplicates). Once you have a sharepoint group it has associated with it a Team site (I can also see these).

 

Now, when in Teams I see that there is automatically a class notebook that can be activated. This all seems brilliant and well thought through, but here is where my question starts: The O365 Groups take the name from the timetable on SIMS 10S/Ph1, etc, this makes sense, but what will happen if a teacher has spent time putting loads of resources into a class notebook and getting it very organised and then the name of the class changes (which it always seems to do) as the timetable is rolled on to the next academic year. Will it be easy to move the Content in the onenote class notebook from one sharepoint site to another?

 

I ask because I am trying to get staff set up with class notebooks for taking in work over the near future and don't want their effort to go wasted. The alternative is to manually create notebooks for teachers and then use the groups to populate the students in the book. I fear this will cause confusion though as they start using teams and seeing the class notebook on there!

 

Sorry for the length of my question, hopefully someone can help,

 

Martyn

[smithson83]

Any name change or new class would result in a new O365 group and Team etc.

The other thing you have to watch out for is, if a pupil changes class, the pupil tab in the class notebook stays where it is, and they get a new tab in their new class.

 

Now think of this in terms of the academic year...!

When the whole class moves up a year, and the Y9 Eng Set 1 gets 30 new students, you've now got 60 pupils in the class OneNote.

We get Salamander to prefix each Team with the current year 2019-91-En1 etc. So that it's always a new Team/Notebook etc.

 

I would see the Team group and the associated notebook more at the pupils normal class books.

 

The Staff should use a departmental Team/notebook to generate the material and use Cross-Notebook distribution to distribute the content to the pupils.

 

 

Edit#

Edit Edit##

There are ways to account for academic year rollover, but they're less than perfect.

Edited March 29, 2020 by smithson83

[mdwheeler]

Thank you, cross notebook idea sounds good

[mdwheeler]

Given the time constraints, I might generate notebooks and populate them using o365 groups to avoid confusion and tell people not to activate their teams notebooks. I have a large number of technophobic staff who are already nearing meltdown. Teams looks brilliant but without proper training it could tip people over the edge!