View options

Completed

View options help learners and colleagues connect in meaningful and personalized ways.

Microsoft is changing the way educators, learners, and colleagues see each other—literally! In addition to the 3x3 Gallery view, which shows up to nine people in a meeting, there's a Large Gallery view of 7x7 to show up to 49 participants!

Things get interesting in together mode, which contains an arena or lecture hall background with all the participants—including the educator—seated together. This makes participants feel like they’re all in the same room. The arena even expands as participants join or turn on their cameras! In together mode, select the pencil icon in the bottom left corner to choose from over half a dozen indoor and outdoor scenes to enjoy together.

Finally, Focus allows educators to switch to full screen and hide the thumbnails of participants to get rid of distractions.

Microsoft Teams is always working to provide educators and learners ways to personalize and optimize their live and collaborative meeting experiences.

Learners have a way of finding loopholes, including during online synchronous learning. With hard audio mute, educators keep collaboration to the right moments and mute learners when it’s time to focus. Meeting options are there to prevent attendees from unmuting themselves. Mute all learners from the participants pane and control their ability to mute and unmute their audio.

To give educators time to prepare for class or prevent others from joining without permission, use the Lobby to control when learners may enter a meeting.

Security is important, and features like secure join links, mute all, and end meeting allow educators to keep learners safe and free from distractions during virtual classes. For more security, creating meetings in Outlook includes the option to prevent forwarding of meeting invites. This means only those invited (that is, a DL with the class roster!) are able to enter the meeting.