Microsoft Teams sets sights on the classroom with new features

By Dan Thorp-Lancaster
published

Microsoft Teams, Microsoft's Slack competitor, has already tackled the workplace, and now it has set its sights on the classroom. Team is now available in preview through Office 365 for Education with a slew of new features for students, teachers, and administrators alike.

Teams now offers plenty of things that should appeal to teachers, ranging from quickly organizing classes to distributing assignments. From Microsoft (opens in new tab):

Using Teams, they can quickly and efficiently create classes with automatically populated student rosters from their school information system; share files and teaching materials; make announcements; divide the class into project groups and monitor progress; create, distribute and grade quizzes; deliver personalized learning with OneNote Class Notebooks; and distribute, collect and grade assignments.

In addition to letting students, teachers and administrators communicate and collaborate on documents in real time, Teams has also added some new integrations for classrooms. Canvas, Flipgrid, Kahoot!, and busuu all help students do everything from learning a new language to playing learning games and participating in video discussions.

Though Teams is only available in preview in Office 365 for Education, it's expected to become generally available for all education users later this summer. And for schools with Windows 10 S devices, Teams is also coming to the Windows Store in the third quarter of 2017.

Dan Thorp-Lancaster
Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. 

8 Comments
  • Is there a reason why Microsoft uses stock packages for these even for organizations and education institutions? I mean why can't a university say, hey we want Office 365 Pro Plus but we also want Teams which is not in the normal package and still get?
  • love it, hope the colleges also replace blackboard with Microsoft team / this gonna be amazing
  • Even Slack released a UWP app while Microsoft Team is still providing a classic win32 app for desktop. :/
  • Slack is UWP on Mobile only though right? As is Teams
  • Nope, they have different apps for PC and Mobile. I'm talking about this: microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/slack/9wzdncrdk3wp which is released for PC only. :)
  • Ah okay, I don't think that is a UWP app. It's just a Centennial app (Win32 app) distributed through the store. Microsoft are putting the full Office package in the store (I assume Teams too since it needs to run on W10S) but it doesn't make them UWP, just distributed through the store.
  • Does anybody know if Microsoft Teams for Education is the same Microsoft Teams thats used for Business or does it have more or different features
  • I think Teams makes a lot more sense for the teachers. For kids though, how often do they collaborate remotely with each other - For homework I would imagine it'd potentially be a challenge to pull them away from just using WhatsApp, Facebook or FaceTime to talk about homework projects etc. As kids don't sit at desks in front of computers at most schools they won't necessarily have constant access to it. Lots of good stuff from the event, just think it will be a struggle to get kids using Teams in a more effective way than they currently learn and collaborate