Breakout rooms in Microsoft Class Teams launched in January 2021, allowing teachers to create sub-meetings within the main class meeting for students to work together in small groups and discuss their learning. In this discussion, we’ve included everything you need to know about breakout rooms in Teams, from how to set them up to safeguarding … Read more
Schools are currently facing additional challenges when managing class cover as a result of a teacher being absent due to sickness, needing to self-isolate or be re-deployed to teach key worker students. Cloud Design Box has created a solution that allows schools to quickly and easily organise class cover, making sure the member of staff … Read more
Cloud Design Box and SalamanderSoft have partnered up to design and deliver three free webinars tailored to schools, academies and Multi Academy Trusts who are looking to make the most out of remote and blended learning with Microsoft Teams. Throughout January and February, the training sessions are free to anyone who works at a school, … 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 includes rubric based grading. They can be created and reused … Read more
Microsoft Teams meeting recordings are no longer in Microsoft Stream for many education licenses. This means it can be difficult to find or delete recordings at the current time. Microsoft are planning on moving all meeting recordings into OneDrive and SharePoint However, in the meantime recordings are stored in a temporary location (causing issues like … Read more
SharePoint is a great place for a school or business to store shared resources. However, it can be difficult to keep track of all the different document locations. The new “Add shortcut to OneDrive” feature is a great way of keeping track of all the documents you use on a regular basis. Not only does … Read more
Our Office 365 User Adoption Podcast highlights real-life stories from schools, academies and Multi Academy Trusts on how they’ve successfully rolled out Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Teams to staff and students. In this podcast episode, we spoke with Rachael Howarth, Vice Principal at Bradford Girls’ Grammar School and Business Studies teacher on how they’re using … Read more
With breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams, the teacher can split the class into groups to work on shared tasks, projects, or even competitive challenges. Breakout rooms are private so students can have some one-on-one help from the teacher. As a teacher, you can jump into rooms to see how everyone is doing, give clarification or … Read more
The main challenge schools, academies and multi academy trusts face when rolling out a new technology or platform is user adoption. Typically, a core group of tech-savvy teachers and staff embrace the new technology, while others are left behind. This results in various, separate solutions being used within the school, with learning resources scattered across … Read more
Cloud Design Box is hosting five free virtual events in December and January, especially designed for teachers to help them make the most of Microsoft Teams and deliver outstanding learning to their students. As Microsoft Global Education Training Partners with CPD-certified courses, we’re delighted to be partnering with two leading technology providers, who specialise in … Read more
As a teacher it’s important to measure engagement of students that are home learning. Microsoft Teams has given us a quick and easy tool to enable us to do this. In this post we look at how to download an attendance report of an online lesson. Once the participants of your Teams meeting have left and before you exit the meeting window you can view and … Read more
Arbor MIS is partnering with Cloud Design Box to host three free training sessions specially designed for schools, academies and multi academy trusts who are using, or planning to use, Microsoft Teams to deliver blended learning for their students. Click here to register for any of our three sessions Arbor MIS works with over 1,250 … Read more
During these difficult times, blended learning has been critical in providing students with uninterrupted learning. The blended learning approach can provide an effective way of reinforcing face-to-face learning with online resources and interaction. However, it can be difficult especially with students working remotely and it is a challenge for the school to identify students who … Read more
Are you new to Teams or not quite sure about the right places to do things? We have created a simple overview below for some of your key educator actions! 1. Posts Have group discussions, video calls and praise students. Great for communicating with your class. 2. Files Individual student work folders for any work … Read more
In this podcast, we spoke with James Emmet, Network Manager at Engineering UTC North Lincolnshire about how they use features in Office 365 to support students with Special Education Needs (SEN) and English as an Additional Language (EAL). “We have a high number of students who are EAL, SEN, dyslexic and have low reading ages. … Read more
So, you have school data sync setup and all of your class teams have been generated in Microsoft Teams. Teachers are eager to start using it for extending the classroom or remote learning. Teachers then realise that students can do things that they were not aware of and request for some rights to be restricted. … Read more
Managing document expiry can be time consuming and difficult to track. Maybe you have policy documents which need refreshing every year or machine calibration/certification documents which need to be regularly reviewed. It’s surprisingly easy to setup expiry notifications in SharePoint. Follow the simple steps below or watch the video for a walk through. Adding an … Read more
We’ve spoken a lot on this blog and in our podcast about how Microsoft Teams and SharePoint transforms the classroom, from sharing class resources with pupils to improving student engagement with Digital Ink and Class Notebook. However, there are also many opportunities to use these tools to drive School Leadership Teams. We spoke with Gareth … Read more
All Class Teams provisioned by Microsoft School Data Sync are now deactivated for students. This means the students can only access the team once the teacher has pressed the activate button. Monitored Conversations One huge benefit is that students cannot have conversations in the team until it becomes activated. When hundreds of teams are created … Read more
Guest post by Courtney Farrow with video by Tony Phillips With 98% of classrooms now using computers, laptops and tablets, it’s safe to say that digital learning is here to stay. However, many teachers still find themselves chained to their desktop computers, whiteboards and paper notebooks, unable to invest time and energy into making lessons … Read more
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