Working in a school, you have a lot of responsibilities and challenges to face every day. You want to provide the best education possible for your students, while also ensuring their well-being and safety. Well, you can achieve both these goals with the help of Microsoft products.
Microsoft offers a range of tools and features that can help you increase student engagement, improve learning outcomes, and foster collaboration and communication among teachers, students, and parents. In this blog post, we will highlight some of the ways you can use Microsoft products to enhance your school’s learning environment.
The Hub - Microsoft Teams
One of the key products you can use is Microsoft Teams, a digital hub that brings together chat, video meetings, file sharing, assignments, and apps in one place. Teams allows you to create online classrooms where you can interact with your students, assign and grade work, provide feedback, and monitor progress. You can also use Teams to communicate with other staff members, share resources, and participate in professional development.
One of the features of Teams that can help you increase student engagement is Reading Progress. Reading Progress is a tool that helps students practice their reading fluency and comprehension skills. It allows students to record themselves reading a passage of text and then get feedback on their accuracy, rate, expression, and pronunciation. You can also review their recordings and provide personalised support. Reading Progress can help you track your students’ reading growth over time and identify areas for improvement. Best of all, students love doing it! It is less pressure to read to a device rather than in front of peers, they can practise (if you give them multiple attempts) and improve and it saves automatically so you can evidence progress throughout the year.
Reflect - the wellbeing check-in
Another feature of Teams that can help you enhance student well-being is Reflect. Reflect is a tool that helps students and teachers check in with their emotions and feelings. It allows you to create polls and surveys that ask your students how they are feeling, what they are grateful for, what they are worried about, or any other question you want to ask. You can also choose to share your own reflections with your students or keep them private. Reflect can help you foster a positive classroom culture, support social-emotional learning, and address any issues or concerns your students may have. You can also embed Reflect check-ins within OneNote Class Notebook.
Class Notebook – your multimedia digital workbook
A third application you can use is OneNote Class Notebook, a digital notebook that lets you create interactive and engaging content for your students. You can use Class Notebook to organise your lesson plans, distribute assignments, insert multimedia elements, create quizzes, and more. You can also use Class Notebook to give your students their own personal workspace where they can take notes, draw, write, or record audio. Class Notebook integrates seamlessly with Teams, so you can access it from within your online classroom. As a teacher, you have full visibility of each student’s personal space within Class Notebook so can keep them accountable and support them with personalised feedback.
One of the benefits of Class Notebook is that it allows you to share your students’ work with their parents or guardians. You can do this by creating a personalised link for the student, or one for each member of your class, and sending the link to view their child’s notebook online. Alternatively, you can use the Parent Connection app for Teams. The Parent Connection app lets you invite parents or guardians to join a private chat where they can see their child’s assignments, grades, feedback, and progress reports. You can also use the app to communicate with them directly and answer any questions they may have. This way, you can keep parents or guardians informed and involved in their child’s learning.
These are just some of the ways you can use Microsoft products to increase student engagement and enhance the quality of education in your school. By using these tools and features, you can also save time and energy on administrative tasks and dedicate more of your precious time to tasks which have greater impact on your students.
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