Teams Chat - Student Restrictions

[Planehazza]

We have multi group assigned policies set in Teams to prevent students using the chat 'app' in Teams. We still, however, allow chat within meetings or the class teams where they're in a 'safe' environment with a teacher that can monitor messages.

 

Just wondering how you're handling said restrictions? Not necessarily the Teams settings/policies, more the school policy or what SLT have told you to do?

[Boredguy]

We have chat disabled in the Teams policies to stop students from doing 1 to 1 chats, but within the Team chat we leave it down to staff to either monitor what the students are saying (same as in a meeting chat window), or they have the option to enable the moderation mode on the General Channel which only allows Owners to start new conversations, but of course students/members can always reply to those messages.

[Planehazza]

We have chat disabled in the Teams policies to stop students from doing 1 to 1 chats, but within the Team chat we leave it down to staff to either monitor what the students are saying (same as in a meeting chat window), or they have the option to enable the moderation mode on the General Channel which only allows Owners to start new conversations, but of course students/members can always reply to those messages.

 

Same here. Don't forget, teachers (as owners) can go the team settings and mute students, either as individuals or all, preventing them from chatting entirely.

 

We've had an incident resulting in a request from SLT to block chat between staff and students entirely 🤦 Just seems like a kneejerk reaction.

[Boredguy]

Well other than the Team Owner muting students, there isn't much you can do, and that has to be done manually in each Team

[Planehazza]

Well other than the Team Owner muting students, there isn't much you can do, and that has to be done manually in each Team

 

Yup, that's how I understand it. I can use chat role permissions to set students to Restricted and staff to Limited or Full Access, but this won't address this request. The request, IMO, is flawed; it's not the answer to this one issue, but it's not my decision to make. I'm meeting SLT about it soon so hopefully I can make the case of the importance of Teams chat within a class team for homework setting etc.

[Boredguy]

It's not a technical issue, but rather a class management one. Staff have the ability to enable moderation mode, and mute students.

 

When I create all our teams via Powershell, I have them all configured so that Members are not able to delete or edit their posts, so anything students do say is there until the teacher decided to deal with it.

Teams is designed for a business use, and has had educational requirements shoehorned into it and should be treated as such a product.

[Planehazza]

It's not a technical issue, but rather a class management one. Staff have the ability to enable moderation mode, and mute students.

 

Exactly my point

When I create all our teams via Powershell, I have them all configured so that Members are not able to delete or edit their posts, so anything students do say is there until the teacher decided to deal with it.

Teams is designed for a business use, and has had educational requirements shoehorned into it and should be treated as such a product.

 

Same, though we do not manage it ourselves, and instead rely on the service from Cloud Design Box to provision it for us.