Create a Microsoft Team for your School Staff

Create a Microsoft Team for your School Staff

by | Apr 1, 2020 | Office 365, Teams

Having a Microsoft Team for all your school staff gives everyone a single place for communications, video meetings and other resources.  Stop everyone from searching through their email inbox for shared files, video meeting links and conversations.  Set up a single collaborative space and make life easier.

A Microsoft Team for your School Staff provides a single collaborative space where you can:

  • Communicate with Staff
  • Share Files
  • Store shared information in the OneNote notebook

Rather than requiring staff to search email for meeting codes, shared file links and conversations, everything can be organised in context.

Use Channels

Use Channels to separate information types – this keeps resources and conversations in context 

Channels could include:

  • Announcements
  • Meetings (video)
  • Daily Briefings
  • Teacher only channel
  • All Staff informal channel
  • Staff wellbeing
  • Professional Development
  • Social Club

Channel Settings – Control Posts and Replies

Channel settings can be changed to manage who can Post to a Channel.
This is useful in an Announcements Channel where leadership only can Post.

In the screenshot you can see that only Team Owners can Post and members can Reply.

Channel Settings – Create a Private Channel

Channels can also be set as Private when created.

This is useful where a group of Staff (eg. Teachers) can have a private space for their particular group.

In the screenshot the Teacher Office channel could be set as Private for Teachers to access for Teaching related work

Connect your SharePoint Portal

Schools using SharePoint Portals can easily connect Portal Document Libraries into their Microsoft Team

In the screenshot a Tab has been added on the top menu linking to the Teams Resources document library on a SharePoint School Portal. This tab makes those files available from the Team.

 

A Single Collaborative Space

Microsoft Teams provides that single collaborative space for your staff to work in and communicate in.  You can even bring external meeting participants from outside your organisation to a video meeting fr professional development sessions.

How Microsoft Teams is improving the quality of our email

How Microsoft Teams is improving the quality of our email

by | Jun 22, 2019 | Office 365, Teams

Microsoft Teams Adoption

We recently rolled out Microsoft Teams to Staff in the support office of our organisation, Catholic Education Cairns. Our senior leaders made the decision to go with Office 365 as our single Collaborative Platform to reduce some of the friction that existed when we had a multitude of document storage spaces and document creation tools, without the advantages of strong collaborative features.

It has only been 9 weeks since we setup Staff computers and mobiles with Microsoft Teams, informally introduced the features of Teams and introduced staff to Team’s Chat and Team’s Conversations.

We could see the potential that Teams would make to staff working collaboratively and knew staff would appreciate the change to a single platform for document sharing.  But I didn’t expect such a positive response to Microsoft Team’s Chat and Conversation features from Staff who had been entrenched in email and document storage spaces.

Microsoft Teams Chat and Conversations

Since moving our support Office staff to Microsoft Teams two months ago we have seen a 300% increase in Microsoft Team’s Chat traffic, and a 100% increase in our Microsoft Team’s Conversations messages.  This prompted me to seek some anecdotal feedback from staff in our office on what differences they had noticed so far.

Staff say they are increasingly using Chat for internal communications instead of email and that the number of emails they are getting has reduced because of that. But the significant advantage – win! – is that the overall quality of email has increased.  Because Microsoft Team’s Chat takes care of the short email conversations they used to have in their email, their Inbox is reduced of clutter and long email threaded conversations.  So the overall Quality of their email has improved.

In the same way Microsoft Team’s Conversations has supported improving email quality.  Staff communicating in Team Conversations can see other staff responses to a conversation in context – not by scrolling past a dozen or more emails (and email signatures!) to get the conversation. Staff find it easier to “make sense of the conversation” because everyone’s replies or reactions are right there in the Teams Conversation.  “You can so easily see who has responded and how they have responded. It’s soooooo much easier”, one staff member commented.  The traditional “email to all reply to all – maybe” poor communication practice is starting to fade out.

Enhanced Communication and Collaboration Experience

In Teams conversations staff are also making good use of the emoji responses.  Simple clicks to indicate they have read a Conversation or Reply have helped people work smarter, simpler and with a bit more fun. Being able to express a bit of personality into a message using a Sticker, GIF or emoji has enhanced our conversations.

It’s really satisfying to see new digital tools being able to support staff in their work – actually making a noticeable difference that they can experience rather than just replacing one tool with another. We are a collaborative organisation by nature, it’s in our DNA, and Microsoft Teams is a digital tool which is enabling our collaboration much more effectively to help us work simpler, smarter and smoother.

 

What is Microsoft Teams?