stefanurech

Dear Dave, thank you very much for your valuable input! Wow I would be very interested in reading your master thesis! Could you maybe send it to me? 2012... you really are way ahead of us in the UK in this regard! I absolutely agree that the way the technology is used and the organisations mindset towards is at least as important as the technology itself. That is exactly the impression I got from the conversations I've had so far. This morning I spoke with an IT director of a high school in Sheffield who is about to introduce the weekly digest feature. The number of posts here and especially on the Microsoft UserVoice platform addressing this topic makes me believe that there are quite a few schools that are using it. My main focus is not on the question of weather it improves the quality of work or the discipline of the students in any empirical way. By conducting interviews with "experts" on the topic, who have made the shift from the paper agenda system to the new digital way of assigning homework and how teachers (especially IT sceptical teachers) at that school reacted. Do they suddenly feel more observed by parents, who can now see every new task that is assigned? Do they get more phone calls from parents or less? How was the shift to the digital assignment of homework decided? Top down or were the teachers involved in that decision? How were they trained? Etc... Do I assume correctly that you don't use the weekly (or daily if you work with Google Classrom) digest feature at your school? How are parents informed of their kids assignements? - - - Updated - - - That would be very interesting for me! Thank you!! [email protected]

Hello everybody! I'm a soon to be teacher from Zürich, Switzerland and am currently writing my master thesis on the use of Microsoft Teams and especially the "weekly parental digest“ function. Since Teams is only making its way slowly into the Swiss school system it is hard for me to find somebody to talk to, who has experience with its use in the classroom and and teachers/parents/students' reactions to it. Could you maybe help me? I would appreciate it very much! I would only take up about 30 minutes of your time. Thank you for your answer in advance and best regards from Zürich, Stefan Urech +41 79 722 77 56 [email protected] PS: The common way to give school assignments or assign homework in Switzerland is still writing them into a paper agenda, which has to be signed by the parents on a weekly basis. My master thesis tackles the question of whether the classroom management systems like Teams could replace this written paper agenda system and what advantages and disadvantages they bring with them. With a special focus on the „weekly parental digest“ function. Sadly this function isn't fully supported yet in Switzerland, so I had to simulate the weekly emails for half a year by creating Excel spreadsheets for each student of two classes. After the test phase, I questioned the parents and the students about their experience with this new kind of assignment management. The reactions were quite positive. But the parents had some ideas for improvement and a lot of thirst for more information. A majority of the students said that they had a lot more discussions about their homework with their parents than before the "weekly digest" test phase. Many teachers at my school are still quite skeptical about the new system since they worry that it will be a lot more work for them.