Class Notebook has a really nice feature which allows teachers to distribute pages to student sections so that they can work on their own copy of the page. Since we originally looked at this in a previous blog post, Microsoft Teams now supports setting assignments using Class Notebook pages too. Essentially there are two ways … Read more
Office 365
You know how much Office 365 could transform your school or academy, but how do you convince the rest of the staff and student body? Getting everyone on board with a new concept or piece of software is a challenge for all organisations, but by sharing experiences, we can learn from others who have been … Read more
SharePoint, Class Notebook and Teams forms the foundation for curriculum delivery at The Cornerstone Academy Trust. Hearing stories about how other schools and academies are thriving with Office 365 and SharePoint is a great way to feel inspired. Our new podcast series focuses on real-life user adoption cases and aims to encourage a community resource … Read more
We understand that seamless user adoption of Office 365 and SharePoint can prove tricky, with many hurdles to jump before your whole organisation is fully on board. That’s why we’re creating a series of podcasts focusing on real-life user adoption stories, with schools, academies and businesses just like yours. The second episode features Tony Phillips, … Read more
At Cloud Design Box, we have created a free Google search box SPFx web part. It’s a very simple web part to add a Google search box to a modern SharePoint page which then opens up the results in a new tab. Maybe a nice web part for an intranet homepage? You can download it … Read more
Smooth, frictionless user adoption can be tricky. You’ve decided that Office 365 and SharePoint is right for you. But, there’s the small matter of convincing the rest of your team and getting everyone in your organisation on board. We’re creating a series of podcasts focusing on real-life user adoption stories, with schools, academies and businesses … Read more
It’s the update that schools have been waiting for. Today Microsoft announced parental access to Microsoft Teams assignments through a regular email digest. This update enables the school to emphasise the importance of homework and provide parents with all the information they need to fully support their children at home. Below is a preview (real … Read more
Releasing organisational and team communication via SharePoint news articles is a powerful way to connect with colleagues. News articles in SharePoint appear aggregated on the SharePoint home page and get pushed out to the mobile app via notification. They render great in both experiences. I’ve had several users ask for enhancements for SharePoint news, we … Read more
The future role of SharePoint with the advent of Teams has been on my mind for over a year now. Teams is built on top of SharePoint but is an application rather than a website. Teams has chat and collaboration, but SharePoint has news and is interconnected with related sites through Hub sites in sometimes … Read more
Microsoft Forms quizzes can now be assigned to students in Microsoft Teams for education. These are auto-marked and the results are fed automatically into the teachers markbook. Find out how to use this new functionality in the video below. You can find out more about how we can integrate Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Class Notebook … Read more
Sharing a document via SharePoint has many advantages. Traditional ways of sharing a document (such as emailing) creates many problems such as having multiple versions, removing central governance, it can cause confusion and inefficiency in any organisation. Sharing a document via SharePoint ensures there will only be one version of the truth, it keeps the … Read more
Rubrics are a powerful tool used to assess students’ work. The criterion helps students to have a concrete understanding and visualisation of what they need to do to achieve a particular score. Each criterion also includes a gradation scale of quality. Microsoft Teams for education now includes rubric based grading. They can be created and … Read more
There’s a real buzz around Microsoft Teams. Microsoft have been increasing the momentum by releasing updates to improve the class collaboration tool recently. In this post I’m going to look at some of the updates already released and some coming very soon. You can find out more about the future updates here: Microsoft Education Blog. … Read more
Tagging resources with metadata can provide a range of advantages when it comes to sorting, grouping and searching. You might decide to create a custom view to group items outside of any folder structure. This would be particularly useful if you had a complex folder structure but wanted to group all the documents of a … Read more
Microsoft Forms are a great way to quickly gather survey results or produce quizzes. It could be testing employees on health and safety in OneNote or it could be setting students a topic quiz in Class Notebook. In this post, I’m going to go through the steps on how to add a quiz to OneNote. … Read more
Homework has many benefits for students including learning how to work independently, staying organised and taking responsibility for their part in the educational process. It also gives them a chance to review the lesson and go over the material again. Assignments give teachers the ability to track student progress and to see if the student … Read more
PowerApps is a great tool at building complex business applications using logic and no code. Microsoft provide several themes out-of-the-box to give your app a consistent look and feel. There is no option to create a custom theme (please release this functionality Microsoft)! As a workaround, we can use some logic to have a single … Read more
OneNote Class Notebook is free for education users as part of Office 365, it has some additional functionality which isn’t available in standard OneNote files. In this blog post, I want to focus on the additional learning tools available in this version. There is also a video guide for this post below. How do I … Read more
There’s no denying that Office 365 now provides a fantastic integrated suite of products. Why should schools and colleges look at moving to Office 365? Can it save time, money and improve student engagement? Let’s take a look in more detail. Why is cloud storage important? Office Integration One of the big benefits of using … Read more
When using the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), we can use spHttpClient to manage our REST calls. Creating new fields (columns) in lists is like using jQuery ajax methods, first we feed in the body of our call in JSON format. [code lang=”js”] const spOpts: ISPHttpClientOptions = { body: "{‘Title’: ‘Group’, ‘FieldTypeKind’:2,’Required’:false, ‘EnforceUniqueValues’: ‘false’,’StaticName’: ‘Group’}" }; [/code] … Read more