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Configure Teams for Education

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Microsoft Teams is a digital hub that brings conversations, meetings, files, and apps together in one place. Because Teams is built on Office 365, schools benefit from integration with their familiar Office apps and services. It delivers enterprise-grade security and compliance that is extensible and customizable to fit the needs of every school.

With Microsoft Teams, your school or institution can create collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, communicate with school staff, coordinate research across institutions or more easily facilitate student life efforts like clubs or extracurricular activities – all from a single experience in Office 365 for Education.

Microsoft Teams for Education comes with all the powerful communication and collaboration tools that are available to other Teams users. Select here to configure Teams for your school.

Unique Teams capabilities for education users

  1. A simplified Teams view that provides a simpler way to navigate and reduces visual distractions.

  2. OneNote Class Notebooks are built into every class team, allowing educators to organize interactive lessons and deliver personalized learning right from Teams.

  3. End-to-end assignment management in Teams enables educators to move quickly and effortlessly from creation and distribution to grading and feedback.

  4. Class home pages for your class teams allows educators to post announcements, pin class resources, show upcoming assignments and recently edited files, and more from a class's home page in Teams.

    1. Currently, Home page is automatically placed in the Teams left rail menu, but IT admins can choose to block or allow Home page in the Teams Admin Center.

Assignments and weekly guardian e-mail digest

One of the new features related to Assignments is the weekly guardian e-mail digest which are weekly emails sent to students' parents or guardians. The emails will contain information about assignments from the previous week and for the upcoming week, and will be sent over the weekend. The emails need to be set up and updated by the admins using the School Data Sync feature. SDS automatically populates classes for Teams with student rosters from the school’s student information system (SIS). The steps to enable this feature are:

  1. Import parent contact information via Parent and Guardian Sync in SDS. Select here for instructions on how to enable Parent and Guardian Sync.

  2. Turn on the Guardian Setting in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center, as the setting is turned off by default. This will enable educators to send out a weekly digest. For more information, see Expand Teams across your organization. Educators can opt-out of the digest by deselecting the setting inside their own personal class team (Settings > Parent/Guardian Emails).

Select here to find more information on Assignments and related features you can turn on in the Admin center.

Select here for more information on Teams for Education.

Select here for more information on School Data Sync (SDS).

Next steps

Once you have configured Teams for Education and Assignments settings, you're ready to deploy Office 365.