New Teams in Teams

[Jawloms]

Morning,

 

How are people setting up next year's Teams in Teams? We have five tutor groups per year, and SLT wanted each tutor group to have it's own lesson, so we have for example "7A English", "7A French", "7A Geography" for every subject, and then repeated for every tutor group at KS3. KS4 is obviously not taught in tutor groups, but it follows the same idea that every single class has it's own team. We have talked about setting up a team per year and then using channels to break it down to tutor groups or subjects, but the trouble with that is when you set an assignment, it gets done in the team so everyone can see it, meaning if you want 7A to do some homework, but 7B won't get that homework until a couple of days later, 7B can already see it.

 

There has to be a tidy way of doing things? What are others doing please?

 

Thank you

[ivantalboys]

We use Microsoft's School Data Sync function to create teams and populate them for each class as listed in our MIS. Salamandersoft provide a free tool to extract the data from SIMs in to SDS compatible csv files for uploading. This is a manual process but doesn't take long. We are exploring their paid software to automate the process more.

[mavhc]

Add the AD year to the team name, archive the old ones for starters, otherwise you'll end up with many teams with the same name

 

One team per class/teacher combination, so each pupil would be in about 10 teams, and each teacher in maybe 30.

 

Then 1 channel per topic/section of the course, so you'd have about 3-10 channels.

[chazzy2501]

@ivantalboys says use SDS to sync teams. Slamandersoftware will produce csv files that will not only make all the classes in sims but give the teacher control of the team and add the pupils to the teams.

 

When a year finishes SDS have a markdown tool that will archive all the previous team groups by making them read only and re-naming them (so pupil can access previous work). This is because you'll still be using the same team names (class names) as before but with new pupils.

 

This is well worth the effort and took about 1 day for me. I did have to update SIMS to include pupils email addresses (O365 school ones) to help the sync.

[Boredguy]

For KS4 classes, when we created them all last year we added the year they span, so ones created this year will be 2021-2023, so we can easily see which ones to archive off as well.

 

KS3 classes just had the year and subject in the name and we'll just remove the students/staff and add the new ones since we do it all via powershell based on class membership reports from SIMS

[chris11256]

We use Salamander as well, so it's complely hands free from our point of view. Any set in our MIS then gets created automatically as a Team, Staff are aware that they then need to activate the team before students can see it.

[kennysarmy]

We ask our teachers to create Teams for their own classes - doesn't take them long and there is a set naming convention.

[Jawloms]

I've exported my data using the salamander tool (still need to edit and fine tune it) and just watched this video;

 

 

It looks a bit scary though if I'm honest! I'd like to see the teams it is going to create, and who is in them. I don't really want it creating 00's of teams which I then want to alter slightly, and have to delete and re-create them. Is there a preview bit or something?

 

Thank you

 

Stuart

[Steve21]

Out of curiosity, anyone who uses Salamander (full tool) is there a way to customise the CSVs before they get uploaded?

 

Last year we used unified groups within Salamander to match to existing Teams as it was a new install, but this year I still want to customise the display names e.g. 21/22 - English etc, rather than just 7A/Eng etc, and there doesn't seem to be anything to do that within Salamander by default. And I'm guessing if I manually do an upload first via SIMs reports etc, it then won't match to what Salamander is using to automatically update after

 

Thanks,

Steve

[Norphy]

Out of curiosity, anyone who uses Salamander (full tool) is there a way to customise the CSVs before they get uploaded?

 

Last year we used unified groups within Salamander to match to existing Teams as it was a new install, but this year I still want to customise the display names e.g. 21/22 - English etc, rather than just 7A/Eng etc, and there doesn't seem to be anything to do that within Salamander by default. And I'm guessing if I manually do an upload first via SIMs reports etc, it then won't match to what Salamander is using to automatically update after

 

Thanks,

Steve

 

Just contact Salamander with your requirements. I asked them to follow a precise naming scheme with Teams, they happily followed it.

 

It’s easiest, I found, to treat Salamander as a block box. Any alterations, ask them to do it.

[Jawloms]

I've exported my data using the salamander tool (still need to edit and fine tune it) and just watched this video;

 

 

It looks a bit scary though if I'm honest! I'd like to see the teams it is going to create, and who is in them. I don't really want it creating 00's of teams which I then want to alter slightly, and have to delete and re-create them. Is there a preview bit or something?

 

Thank you

 

Stuart

 

Does anyone know please?

 

Thank you

[Norphy]

The free Salamander utility spits out a series of CSV files which are relatively easy to read, if that’s what you want to do but AFAIK, there is no preview function either the Salamander utility or in SDS.

 

One of the CSV files will contain the teams that SDS will generate and/or update