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
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 video guide, we take you through adding the insights tab to Class Teams and how to use it to track student usage, assessment trends, digital activity and much more. You can find out more information on Cloud Design Box and how we can help your school get the most out of Microsoft Teams … Read more
In this video and guide we show you the best way to start an online lesson in Microsoft Teams. Follow the tips below if you want to control presenters and have more control over the video conference. Tip 1 – Schedule your lesson Scheduling your lesson in the calendar rather than starting a meeting on … Read more
We have made a quick video guide for students and parents about using Microsoft Teams from home during this time of remote learning. We hope you find it useful!
In this podcast episode, we’ve taken a different approach. Instead of focusing solely on a school’s user adoption methods, we’re looking at how the process can be made easier when you have a Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) in your ranks. But what exactly is an MIE Expert and how can your school, multi-academy trust or … Read more
In the video below, we look at the different ways of setting retention polices in SharePoint and Teams. Some takeaway points: Retention Labels allow more than one policy in a single site Users might not remember or know how to apply Labels Site policies work without any end-user action The document deletion experience is different
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
Cloud Design Box will be exhibiting at Bett 2020 from Wednesday 23rd January until Saturday 15th January 2020 on stand NQ21. Bett is the global meeting place for education buyers and it’s mission is to create a better future by transforming education and bringing together over 800 leading companies and over 34,000 visitors. We will … 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
Conversations and instant messaging are only one part of Microsoft Class Teams. Its true power shines through when teachers share their resources with their classes through the File Sharing tabs and SharePoint integration. Students can immediately access files and resources that their teachers upload and continue learning outside of the classroom. However, many teachers spend … Read more
In our Office 365 User Adoption Podcast this month, Tony and Darren from Cloud Design Box talk about the benefits of tagging resources and discuss metadata vs folders. Why should we tag? SharePoint search is great out-of-the-box. It’s intelligent and searches not just the title of the document but also inside the contents. As people … Read more
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
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
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
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