• Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    Microsoft Teams and Canvas Roundup

    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…

  • Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    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…

  • Educational Tools

    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…

  • Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    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…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    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…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools

    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…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools

    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…

  • Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    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…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    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…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    Microsoft Teams and Canvas: Joining and Recording Meetings and Uploading the Recordings to Canvas

    Reading Time: 2 minutes Last week we talked about how to set up the Microsoft Teams-Canvas integration and create Teams meetings within your Canvas course. Today we’ll be looking at the next step in the process – joining and recording meetings as well as uploading the recordings to your Canvas course.   Joining a meeting  You can quickly and easily join a meeting from Canvas.   In the course navigation, click “Microsoft Teams meetings”  The scheduled meetings for the course will be listed. Canvas will display a “join” button on the meeting tile when the meeting is scheduled to start.  Teams will prompt you to choose how to join the meeting. You can…