Last month, Microsoft announced that Teams had 13 million daily active users, and also unveiled some new features including read receipts for messages and priority notifications for the collaborative service.
Today, the tech giant has revealed a slew of updates for Teams aiming to improve educators" experience. More specifically, the Assignments experience is being overhauled with a complete redesign and a bunch of new features.
To start off, the design of the app has been streamlined, with the Assignments tab now doubling as a to-do list, showcasing work left to review or grade for teachers, as well as upcoming due dates for students. Assignment creation has also been simplified with a single-column layout being used for it now, with more screen space being allocated for editing documents. Moreover, teachers can now view how assignments would appear for students, and grade them in a single click on the go.
There"s also expanded availability for famed plagiarism checking service Turnitin, and Immersive Reader is being integrated with Teams as well. Additionally, education apps including Kahoot, Flipgrid, Buncee, Wakelet, Pear, and many more can now share content directly to Teams, offering a much more helpful experience for students.
Plenty of other features have been brought to the service as well; here"s a compact list describing all that"s new:
- A faster, more streamlined design
- Easy to assign engaging learning activities
- Add assignment resources from any team
- See what your students see
- Add Close dates to your assignments
- Assign content from your favorite education apps using the Share to Teams button
- Use Immersive Reader to read assignment instructions and feedback
- Bring Microsoft MakeCode computer science activities to your classroom
- Review student work in a snap
- Grading that goes with you
- Deter plagiarism and grade in one step with Turnitin
- New gradebook
All the aforementioned changes can be read about in detail here. Teams is included with Office 365 for Education, which is completely free to use for all schools worldwide. If your school isn"t signed up for the service yet, you can do so here.