E-learning and Microsoft Teams

Back to school with Ribbon and Cloud Revolution

3
Sponsored Post
Microsoft Teams is making a serious play to become the educator’s tool of choice for students of any age
Collaboration

Published: September 28, 2020

Maya Middlemiss

While many will remember 2020 as the time our familiar UC and collaboration tools crossed the chasm from business to consumer acceptance, another vast use case also opened up with the global lockdown: e-learning. And as providers differentiate into specialisms across the digital collaboration space, Microsoft Teams is making a serious play to become the educator’s tool of choice for students of any age.

To discuss the functionality which has been rolled out at speed through this year and most recently updated at Microsoft Ignite, Ribbon Communications and their partner Cloud Revolution are offering a webinar on the 6th October: Getting the most out of Microsoft Teams for K-12 Education (outside the US that’s the preschool through to 18 level), to help everyone integrate the best of Teams into their teaching environment.

I spoke to Chad McGreanor, from Cloud Revolution, about the event, and he explained the need for timely and effective communication in the classroom in such uncertain times:

“What’s happening right now in distance learning is you have different statuses in each class across the globe right now [with an ever-changing mixture of students at home and in the centre]. Enabling teachers to make phone calls and interact with parents, not using their personal cell phones… Right now sitting at home they need the ability to communicate with students and parents via voice.”

Connecting teachers and students effectively

Chad McGreanor
Chad McGreanor

So a partnership with Ribbon for voice telephony makes total sense, because whatever on-prem solution the school may have been using will not deploy appropriately to a distributed setting and integrate with Teams — and voice is part of the broader ‘digital classroom’ that teachers really need, at a time when any individual or group of students may have to isolate at a moments’ notice. 

In fact, Teams has been quietly introducing features to support teachers throughout the summer, as McGreanor explained, including a new hard mute feature — which just the boss of the room can wield. “When students come in and everybody’s chatting and interrupting, this helps manage the classroom”, he explained. 

“And another feature released recently is a hard spotlight view, where the teacher can push their image or video to the students”. Surely students wouldn’t dream of distracting themselves by looking at each other instead, or muting the teacher? Certainly in my daughter’s school back in spring, many of the students were considerably more comfortable with the technology than those in charge. Teachers have a need for control, but it’s easy to see this functionality being widely useful in many business settings too.

“That’s one of the features a lot of teachers have been asking for”, he continued, “and if we bubble it all up, it’s the ability to manage the classroom in a different way, compared to what it’s physically like in person.”

Evolving the virtual classroom

It all reflects a maturing of the space beyond the emergency solutions seized hastily in the spring, to a long-term hybrid approach to teaching, based on digital backup in real-time to preferably live teaching processes, ensuring students never miss out on large chunks of the syllabus again due to quarantining requirements.

For those who have never used a .edu domain and seen what Teams looks like as a digital classroom, it might be a valuable eye-opener and insight into extended functionality of a familiar collaboration platform — including all the security, compliance, safeguarding, and other features, that you’d expect from an application designed for the education of all ages.

“A lot of folks across the US [also Europe and the UK] are back to school this month,”, concluded McGreanor, “so we thought it was a good time for a joint webinar giving an overview of Teams at a high level.” 

“Because Teams in the education space is different”

Find out more and register for the joint Ribbon and Cloud Revolution webinar.

 

 

Microsoft Teams
Featured

Share This Post