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:
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.
