Keep attendees engaged and focused during meetings
Educators want to ensure their audience is engaged throughout a Teams meeting.
Use reactions in Teams meetings
An effective way to increase engagement is to use audience participation. With live reactions such as “like,” “heart,” “applause," “laugh,” and “surprise,” attendees can participate in the meeting even when they’re muted. Allow for spontaneous expression or prompt learners to react. The icons appear briefly in the lower part of the educator’s screen while content is being presented. If no content is being presented, the reactions appear over the video tile or the profile icon of the attendee who sent it. Because audience participation isn't always appropriate, educators can turn off this setting.
Raise hands in Teams meetings
During a meeting, attendees can raise their hands virtually to let educators know they want to contribute or ask a question without interrupting the conversation. Attendees select the Raise hand icon, and everyone in the meeting knows they would like to speak. Educators can then pause and allow them to unmute or go to meeting options to unmute them.
To see who has their hands raised, select the People icon in the meeting taskbar. Everyone who has their hand raised has a hand icon next to their name. If multiple people have their hands raised, their names are numbered to show the order in which they raised their hands.
Once attendees speak, Teams detects that they’ve spoken and a notification informs them that their virtual hand will be automatically lowered. Attendees can select Keep it raised if they still wish to speak. Educators can lower everyone’s hands at once by selecting:
- People
- The three dots next to Participants
- Lower all hands
Engagement is only one of the goals for live meetings. Educators need to make sure attendees also stay focused. What’s most important in a Teams meeting changes with the circumstances. Microsoft Teams is everything educators need it to be, even when those needs are fluid.
How Teams meetings focus on content and speakers
Teams meetings are designed to bring shared content front and center and highlight active speakers. When participants join a Teams meeting, Teams smartly anticipates what participants want to see and resizes participant thumbnails and content based on the scenario. Dynamic view intelligently adjusts the screen layout as educators make changes—for example, moving learners’ video feeds depending on whether a sidebar (like the chat or participants pane) is open.
When someone shares content, Teams optimizes the layout to make that content as large as possible while also showing video participants. In together mode, Teams increases the size of the video so participants can see people’s faces while also viewing shared content.
Focus mode in Teams meetings
Many times, there’s more than one important element for learners to focus on, but one element typically deserves more focus. At those times, participants might want to customize the meeting view. With Focus mode, participants can modify their view to limit distractions.
Pin a video
Participants can right-click on any video and pin it. The video is pinned to their view regardless of who’s talking.
Dock people
Dock people to the top of the meeting view. Change the orientation of meeting participants to the top of your screen to maintain better eye contact with others while content is being shared.
Spotlight
A spotlight is a pinned video for everyone in the meeting. Only presenters can set or change spotlights. There are many possible reasons to have more than one video feed highlighted for learners. Spotlight a co-educator or a sign language interpreter. Spotlight a learner sharing information with the class. Or spotlight a pair of learners sharing information. Yes, Teams supports multiple simultaneous spotlights!
Swap content with gallery
By default, when someone shares content, it appears in the center of the meeting view. To swap content for a participant’s video, select the person’s video in the gallery view and swap it with the content being shared. This feature brings the participant’s video to the center of the meeting view and moves the content to the side or top of the meeting view.
Reframe a video
Teams crops some videos to better fit the screen. For a different view, right-click and select Fit to frame to display the entire video.