Reading Time: 2 minutes With Zoom soon going away, now’s the perfect time to do a brief recap of everything we’ve talked about so far with Microsoft Teams. Teams provides an easy replacement for Zoom – it’s integrated directly into your Canvas course, and you can access many helpful Microsoft products from inside a meeting. Let’s review some of the most pertinent information you’ll want to refer to as you get up and running with Teams. Setting up the Integration and Creating Meetings The first thing you’ll need to do is turn on the integration in your course from the settings page. After that, you’ll be able to create meetings…
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Canvas Feature: Microsoft Immersive Reader
Reading Time: 3 minutes We’ve talked a lot about the Canvas/Microsoft partnership and how more Microsoft products and features are being incorporated into Canvas. Today, we’re revisiting one of those features – the Microsoft Immersive Reader. The Microsoft Immersive Reader is now available through more of Canvas. Initially only released on Canvas pages, it’s now also available on the syllabus, assignments, and a course’s home page. This reader presents the page text in a more accessible format where the user can choose the text preferences, grammar options, reading preferences, and to have the page content read to them. To launch the reader, click the “Microsoft Immersive Reader” button at the top right of a…
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Microsoft Teams Meetings Recordings: Tips and Notes
Reading Time: < 1 minute In our deep dive on different Teams Meetings features, today we’ll turn our attention to recordings. You Can’t Pause Recordings In Zoom, you could temporarily pause a recording, then restart it. However, you cannot do this with Teams meetings. If you stop a recording then start recording again, you will have two separate recordings. Remember to Stop Recordings Teams will automatically stop a recording when all participants leave the meeting. However, you shouldn’t rely on that. If one of your students forgets to leave the meeting, the recording will continue for four hours before it’s stopped. Recordings Won’t Capture a Couple of…
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How Do I Set Meeting Options and How Can I Test out Teams Meeting Features?
Reading Time: 2 minutes This week, we’re continuing our deep dive into various aspects of Microsoft Teams meetings and looking at both meeting options and how you can easily run a practice meeting to test various aspects of teams. Getting to and Adjusting Teams Meeting Options The Microsoft Teams Meeting options allow you to control some valuable aspects of the meeting, such as setting up a meeting lobby, restricting who can present, and turning on automatic recording. Before we give best practices for some of these settings, we’ll go over the different way to access these meeting options. Through the “edit” page for a scheduled meeting. You can get to…
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What’s the Difference Between the Sharing Options in Microsoft Teams Meetings?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Today, we’re going to take a deeper dive into screen sharing in a Microsoft Teams meeting. When you open the share menu, you’ll see several options. But what does each do, and how can they help you achieve your goals Screen Sharing with a Document Camera If you want to share content from a document camera, first make sure that your document camera is plugged in. If the camera isn’t plugged in, you won’t see the options in the meeting to share from the camera. Select “Share content” inside your Teams meeting and choose “content from camera.” That will then open a tab where you…
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How Can My Students Join Teams Meetings Scheduled through Canvas?
Reading Time: 2 minutes If your students can’t see scheduled Teams Meetings in the “Microsoft Teams meetings” Canvas navigation link, there are four ways they can access those meetings. Before we dive into those, we have two quick notes: If you have created a repeating meeting, the join link will be the same for each scheduled meeting. To ensure students get all notifications and can join meetings easily, they should download the Microsoft Teams app. Without further ado, let’s look at the different ways students can join your scheduled meetings. Through an email notification When you create a Teams meeting (or series of meetings) inside Canvas, each student who…
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Teams Meeting Features: Live Captions, Polls, and Attendance Report
Reading Time: 3 minutes We’ve looked at some Teams meeting features before when we talked about screen sharing, breakout rooms, and background options. Today we’ll look at three more features inside a Teams meeting — live captions, polls, and attendance reports. Live Captions Microsoft Teams can detect what you say during a Teams meeting and present it as real-time captions at the bottom of the screen. The captions are the most accurate when one person at a time speaks slowly and clearly and is in a place with little background noise. To turn on captions, click the three dots menu in the meeting settings bar and select “Turn on live captions.” Teams will now display captions at the bottom of the window. If…
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Teams Meetings Features: Sharing Screen, Breakout Rooms, and Background Options
Reading Time: 2 minutes We’ve talked previously about how to create Teams Meetings from Canvas and how to join those meetings. Today we’ll look at some of the features available inside of a meeting, such as sharing your screen or dividing participants into breakout rooms. Sharing Screen Teams makes it easy to show files, apps, content from a secondary camera (like a document camera), or even your entire desktop in a meeting. In the top right corner of your meeting window, you’ll see an icon of an arrow inside a rectangle. Click that to open the share options. Here, you can choose how the content should look (e.g., whether you want to appear along with the…
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Microsoft Teams: How Can I Navigate Between Two Organizations?
Reading Time: < 1 minute We’ve been talking recently about how you can use Microsoft Teams with your courses. Today, we’re going to zoom out and talk about something that will not likely affect everyone — how to use Microsoft Teams with multiple organizations (companies/groups). Overall, this is not a complex thing to do. Once you’re in a particular organization’s Teams, you can do all your tasks as normal. However, swapping between organizations can be a bit wonky in certain areas. The good news? It’s easy to swap between organizations on a mobile app! So, if you primarily use Teams on your phone or tablet and need to access multiple organizations, you can easily jump between the groups. The unfortunate news is that it’s a little more complicated if you’re using Teams on a computer. The Teams desktop app does not…
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Microsoft Teams and Canvas: Using a Microsoft Team with a Course
Reading Time: 3 minutes We’ve spent the past couple weeks talking about the Microsoft Teams-Canvas integration — setting up the integration and creating meetings as well as the basics for joining and recording Teams Meetings through Canvas. Today we’re going to pivot and look at Microsoft Teams itself and how you can leverage it to use in your course. Teams allows you to have a secondary space for communication or collaboration in your course. You can create channels and assign members to them, so you could have a channel for your entire class and separate channels with only specific students assigned to them. Student groups could then use those smaller channels for group collaboration work, chatting back and…