Educators, increase collaboration and professional development with new Office 365 Education updates
As part of Microsoft’s Education announcement in April, we announced new experiences and updates to Office 365 Education coming this summer that will make it easier for teachers to manage their classroom and collaborate with peers, and for them or their IT administrators to set it all up. As part of this announcement, we mentioned there’d be even more updates coming this summer! We’re thrilled to share these with you today—all are teacher inspired and student focused.
Today, we are announcing enhanced educator collaboration with PLC groups, better content sharing with Docs.com, easier formative assessments with Microsoft Forms and additional Learning Management System (LMS) and Student Information System (SIS) partners with OneNote Class Notebook.
All educators have access to these new updates through Office 365 Education, which is totally free for teachers and students when you go to office.com/teacher.
Educator collaboration with PLC groups
Aside from getting started with the technology, we know there can be some barriers to collaborating and sharing knowledge between teachers:
•Teachers can be isolated, time is severely limited and collaboration is difficult.
•Professional collaboration tools are disconnected and don’t always support meaningful, sustained collaboration.
•Information is often stored in the personal files of educators, making it difficult for new teachers to ramp up.
To foster collaboration, educators look to professional learning communities (PLCs), where groups of educators can meet regularly to share expertise and work collaboratively to improve teaching skills and the academic performance of students. In April, we announced how we were going to further improve our experience for PLCs by customizing Office 365 Groups to fit this PLC model even more easily.
Today, we are excited to announce the PLC Groups Preview—tailored to meet educator needs and overcome barriers to engagement. Office 365 Education users who are faculty can now create PLC groups, similar to any other Office 365 group, and access shared conversation spaces, file space, OneNote notebooks and calendars. PLC groups also integrate directly with Microsoft Planner, released in general availability with Office 365 earlier this month. Here is an example of how one of our early adopters, Omaha Public Schools, is using PLC groups with Office 365 Education:
Interested in trying the PLC Groups Preview this summer? Office 365 Education customers can sign up here and request to be added to the preview. Read more about PLC groups in this blog post.
Docs.com fosters knowledge and content sharing
We understand another barrier for teachers is knowledge and content sharing within a PLC or across the globe. Teachers are constantly searching for new lessons and their students want to share their work with parents and the world.
Docs.com is the easiest way to create a visually appealing online portfolio that can include OneNote notebooks, Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint slide decks, interactive Sways, PDFs and a host of web content. Docs.com retains all the rich formatting, animations and formulas of your Office documents and can be easily shared with your school and the world. We have been gathering feedback from thousands of amazing educators and students around the globe to ensure that the experience can meet their needs.
We heard from teachers about how some of their content is not quite ready to be shared outside of their school or district, many of which have Office 365 Education as a collaborative platform. Keeping things a little more private sometimes makes students and teachers feel safer about distributing their work. Because of this, today we are announcing the Organization Visibility feature—giving you more granular control over who can see your class content. With Organization Visibility, only people who sign in with an Office 365 work or school account from the same organization (i.e., school or district) can view your content.
Read more about Docs.com in this blog post.
Formative assessment gets easier with Microsoft Forms
Along with collaborating with other educators, we know that most educators’ time is spent in the classroom with the students. Microsoft Forms is the result of direct feedback from educators that they want to have a quizzing function with Office 365 Education. Educators told us they need an easy way to assess student progress on an on-going basis, an assessment solution that will save them time, help differentiate instruction for all students and provide quiz takers with real-time personalized feedback.
Since we announced Microsoft Forms in April, we have added two new features! The first is auto-grading, meaning teachers don’t need to download an add-in or do any complicated workarounds to do grading. The second is real-time, personalized feedback, which allows teachers to provide feedback to students for each answer and question.
Office 365 now works with more of the technology you already use
Since we launched the original Class Notebook add-in assignment and grade integration with Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Information Systems (SIS) and gradebooks, we’ve had many excited educators and schools try it out. We’ve also heard more and more teachers ask for Class Notebook integration with other systems they use. We’ve been busy working with partner companies from around the world over the last couple of months, and today we are announcing more than 35 partners who have committed to working with OneNote and Office 365 Education, with currently over 20 implemented and many more coming soon.
Chula Vista Elementary School District is a customer story that demonstrates how we are working with solutions that educators already use, featuring Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft partner Edmodo.
Getting ready for next school year
To continue to deliver the best products for educators this next school year, we openly ask for your feedback via our UserVoice site. Additionally, we have added a new Office 365 Education public roadmap and blog, so you will soon see new features in our products based on your feedback. Stay tuned for more exciting updates coming over the summer and into next school year.
Sparking opportunity for all youth around the globe
Sometimes all it takes is a spark: that one class, that one teacher, that one project which makes a difference. It can change the lives of young students who may have had little opportunity to excel, or perhaps even to complete high school, to enable them to become successful engineers, entrepreneurs or computer scientists. This is the inspiration behind our global YouthSpark initiative.
Last September, Satya Nadella announced a three-year, $75 million YouthSpark investment to help every young person get the opportunity to learn computing skills and computer science.
Today we are providing an update by announcing YouthSpark grants to 100 nonprofit partners in 55 countries. In turn, our partners will leverage the power and energy of local schools, businesses and community organizations to create new and engaging opportunities for students to explore computer science. These partners will teach students valuable skills to help them prepare for and succeed in jobs that are open today across industries, along with new jobs that will be created. Our partners will build upon the work that Microsoft already has underway, including our commitments to computer science education through programs like Hour of Code with Code.org, BBC micro:bit and TEALS.
Still, much more progress must be made. Despite the need for basic computational thinking skills across all subject areas, in the U.S. less than 25 percent of high schools offer computer science classes. Only 2.5 percent of U.S. high school graduates go on to study computer science in college, and of this small percentage, only 1 in 5 computer science graduates is female. Globally, some countries have made computer science a mandatory subject in secondary schools, but we know firsthand through our own work that far too few schools around the world provide courses in computing. We also recognize that governments play a critical role in continued progress on this important issue. We continue to work with policymakers around the world to support the policy and funding necessary to expand computer science into public education. In the U.S., we’re proud to support Computer Science for All, a national effort created by President Barack Obama to give all American students the opportunity to learn computer science in school.
We know that no single organization or company can close the global computer science education skills gap. That is why we are committed to work in partnership with others. Our efforts have focused on leveraging longstanding community relationships of more than 100 nonprofit partners around the world to create access to computer science, and also to break down barriers and stereotypes that are keeping large populations of youth out of computer science education — even when the opportunities are available.
Later this month, we will bring together some of our local nonprofit partners from around the world during a YouthSpark Summit at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. We’ll learn, discuss, share ideas and develop action plans so that, together with our partners, we can continue to improve and bring better knowledge and expertise to local communities.
Every young person should have an opportunity, a spark, to realize a more promising future. Together with our nonprofit partners, we are excited to take a bold step toward that goal today. Learn more about our nonprofit partners here, and visit YouthSpark.com for more information on our global initiative to make computer science education accessible for all young people.
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LiveTiles Mosaic for Office 365
LiveTiles Mosaic is a free education solution that lets any school with an Office 365 tenant build collaborative, touch-friendly classrooms in the cloud.
Mosaic extends the power of Office 365, pairing modern UX with intuitive, personalized interactions that inspire discovery and accelerate learning outcomes. It allows teachers to create interactive learning spaces via LiveTiles' elementary drag and drop functionality, and connect students to the classroom anywhere, on any device, at any time.
Microsoft is committed to “building immersive and inclusive learning experiences for students and teachers around the world, experiences that build 21st-century skills including communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity and computational thinking,” writes Tony Prophet, corporate vice president of Education Marketing.
In the classroom, OneNote, Skype, Sway and Minecraft empower teachers and students to create and share in entirely new ways, teach and learn through doing and exploring, accommodate any learning style, and focus the classroom experience on learning outcomes, Prophet says.
Yusuf Medhi, Microsoft corporate vice president of Windows and Devices Marketing, writes that with new Windows 10 devices that are “tailor made for education and perfect for students, we are seeing strong demand for Windows 10 in the classroom,” including Windows 10 devices that start at $199.
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New Innovations for the Classroom with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update
By Terry Myerson as written on blogs.windows.com
At Build, we announced the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Today, I’m excited to share additional features for educators and students, alongside other education news today from Microsoft. Today, Windows is the leading global platform for K-12 education. Our enduring goal is for Windows to be the best place to learn and the best platform for teaching.
In today’s modern classroom, our teachers face unique technology challenges:
Over 90% of schools in the US use shared devices and it can take too long for students to get to work quickly.
Nearly 50% of teachers serve as their own tech support in their school classrooms, with unique challenges for set-up, updating devices, and overall ease of use.
Nearly 60% of teachers’ purchase and load apps themselves. Today, locating, purchasing and loading apps across shared devices can be very cumbersome.
And, over half of the students in the world still don’t have ready access to technology. Of those that do, many are using older, slower systems without the benefits of modern innovation.
At the same time, students have so much to gain from the latest technology tools, increasingly not only as a great way to learn, but also as a requirement for many jobs.
All New Tools for Educators with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update
The Windows 10 Anniversary Update delivers new innovations for the modern classroom, including:
Faster, simpler set up with all new tools to help educators get up and running quickly.
The Anniversary Update simplifies the deployment process so a teacher can set up devices in three easy steps, even with no dedicated IT support, with an all new “Set up School PCs” app for setting up a ‘Shared Cart of Devices’ in schools.
For schools with dedicated IT support, the updated Windows Imaging and Configuration Designer tool enables them to set-up shared devices, in bulk, in a matter of minutes.
And, Windows 10 is faster than ever, with an average first log-in of 26 seconds and subsequent log-ins of 6 seconds*, helping classes with shared devices get productive quickly.
Secure Assessments with ‘Take a Test’ App: Teachers and schools need advanced, secure tools for modern test-taking and new tools can simplify standardized testing for a variety of test taking needs.
An all-new “Take a Test” app offers simplified options for test-taking: For high-stakes tests, the app creates a browser-based, locked-down environment for more secure, online assessments, for tests that shouldn’t have copy/paste privileges, access to files, or other distractions. For simple formative and quizzing needs, the app couples with a teacher’s preferred assessment website to deliver digital assessments.
Windows Update Improvements: New ‘active hour’ policies enable devices to update outside of class times so classrooms can stay productive and efficient without disruptions, while helping to keep devices secure and up-to-date.
Education Ready Windows Store: Teachers can easily find, acquire, and assign free and paid apps in the Windows Store for Business. With more than 5 billion visits to the Windows Store, a vibrant storefront is available for educators, with all new apps for experiences from FluidMath, a handwriting-based educational math app, to StaffPad for music composition, BrainPOP and more.
New Technology Helps Students Learn and Educators Teach
These features build on other new innovations which will become available in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update this summer. In the modern classroom, students should be able to write notes on their device as they would on paper, ask questions of their personal digital assistant and trust their security is protected. Windows 10 is designed with security in mind, with features like Windows Defender, Device Guard and Windows Hello. And the Windows 10 Anniversary Update delivers new innovations to help kids learn, including:
Windows Ink enables students to write on their device, create sticky notes, draw on a whiteboard, and merge their analog thoughts with their digital device. Integrated into apps like Office and Microsoft Edge, students can draw on the Web and annotate their documents, digitally, with Windows Ink. Many studies indicate students learn better by writing – for example, diagramming before solving a science problem can lead to 36% higher scores. With Windows Ink, students can do mathematical equations, compose music, and keep their notes organized – all in Windows.
Cortana** creates opportunities for teachers to harness the power of the Web for interactive learning – offering assistance for queries on a wide range of topics, from “what’s the quadratic equation”, to “what is nocturnal”, to “what is hydrogen” and virtually any topic. With the Anniversary Update, Cortana can supply answers while the device is above lock, without requiring any log-in.
Other new technology will integrate with Windows 10, offering even more opportunities for the classroom:
Integration with Microsoft Classroom and OneNote: Students can work on assignments with other classmates, including editing each other’s work in real-time and using Windows Ink within OneNote. The Office team shares more details here.
Minecraft: Education Edition for Windows 10: In June, we will be launching an early access program for Minecraft: Education Edition so any educator can download and try it for free on Windows 10. You can read more from the Minecraft team here.
From South Africa to Australia to Puerto Rico to the US, schools are already embracing Windows 10. With the new enhancements coming in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, we look forward to making it even easier for classrooms to become more productive with Windows 10.
Schools and families can take advantage of the free upgrade offer to Windows 10 for the next few months, or choose from the broad range of Windows 10 devices available for every budget, starting at $199. Devices like the Acer TravelMate B117, ASUS Transformer Book Flip TP200, Dell Latitude 11 Education Series, Dell Inspiron 3000, HP Stream 11 PRO Notebook PC, Lenovo N22, or Surface Pro 4 offer great Windows 10 experiences, perfect for learning.
* For Windows 10 machines in the Shared Cart configuration, running on affordable hardware
**Cortana available in select markets
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Microsoft announces teacher-inspired updates for Windows, Office, ‘Minecraft’
Our company mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. In education, it’s to empower every student. Today, we’re proud to share the latest on what’s coming for Back-to-School 2016/2017.
Introducing Microsoft Classroom and Microsoft Forms, OneNote Class Notebook now with Learning Management System (LMS) integration, new experiences for Windows 10 and the dawn of “Minecraft: Education Edition” – Get ready!
First, we are announcing all new education features coming in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, features specifically inspired by teachers and focused on students.
Faster, easier set-up:
Shared devices in the classroom are the norm – in the U.S., nearly 90 percent of schools report using shared devices. We also know that nearly 50 percent of teachers serve as their own tech support in their classroom. Until now, setting these devices up has been complex and getting students productive often takes too long.
With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update we are introducing a ”Set Up School PCs” app that allows teachers to set up a device themselves in a simple three-step process – in minutes. We’ve also made significant performance improvements for affordable devices. We expect the average first login to take 26 seconds, with subsequent logins of 6 seconds when the student uses that machine again.
Secure assessments:
Testing is going digital — teachers consistently tell us they want a simple way to set up quizzes or standardized tests digitally. The Windows 10 Anniversary Update brings a new ‘Take a Test’ app – simple and more secure standardized testing for the whole classroom or the whole school, where teachers or IT can lock down the testing environment, or enable simple quizzing.
Education-ready Windows Store:
Nearly 60 percent of teachers purchase and load apps themselves. With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the Windows Store will enable teachers to access thousands of apps, and schools can purchase and deploy them in bulk.
Free upgrade and affordable devices:
More and more, educators are asking us about affordable devices. We have a great portfolio of affordable, durable and innovative Windows 10 devices starting at $199, designed for the demands of education.
So you can see, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update brings a huge range of education-specific features that teachers and students are going to love. Learn even more about these new updates, and more, over on the Windows blog!
Second, we are announcing some big improvements to Office 365 Education.
Today we are announcing Microsoft Classroom
– a new experience in Office 365 Education. Microsoft Classroom is designed to be the one place students and teachers come to manage their day – from Class Notebooks, assignments and grades to conversations, calendars and to announcements!
We’re piloting this with Omaha Public Schools in Nebraska. Let me just share with you what they had to say . . .
“It simplifies our digital classroom management and frees up our teachers so they can spend more time with students and less time managing administrative access to class materials.” – Rob Dickson, Executive Director, Information Management Services of Omaha Public Schools.
– a powerful complement for Microsoft Classroom. SDS connects Microsoft Classroom to a School Information System (SIS), so teacher, student and classes information is automatically populated in Microsoft Classroom and OneNote Class Notebooks. School Data Sync will be included in Office 365 Education. Think of it as a super simple process that quickly provisions a set of classes and rosters from many School Information Systems already used.
Also being announced: Microsoft Forms
– a simple way to quickly assess student progress and get feedback with easy-to-create surveys and quizzes. It’s in public preview starting today for Office 365 Education here.
OneNote Class Notebooks are the heart of our education experience and they just keep getting better and better. We have seen incredible momentum – with millions of student notebooks created just this school year. On top of the millions, we are currently seeing an additional new 10,000 student notebooks created per day!
To hear one educator describe it: “It’s your whole classroom (lesson plans, materials, assignments and student work) in a digital binder with tools for communication and collaboration!”
We’re also announcing Class Notebook assignment and grading integration is now available with more than 25 Learning Management System partners
– including leaders like Canvas, Edmodo, Schoology, Brightspace and Moodle. Learn more here.
We’re really excited about all of these improvements for Office 365 Education coming for the new school year! Learn more about all of the updates to Office happening for education – check out the Office blog here.
Finally, we’ve got some great news about “Minecraft: Education Edition”! June begins an early access program of “Minecraft: Education Edition.” It will be available for any educator to download and try for free on Windows 10 and OS X El Capitan.
This program is a great way for educators and administrators who are interested in “Minecraft: Education Edition” to give it a test run in the summer months and give us more feedback and suggestions.
If you are new to “Minecraft” in the classroom, check out education.minecraft.net for resources to help prepare, including lesson plans and a new “Minecraft” mentors program to connect with amazing teachers already using “Minecraft.”
In April 2015 a dozen global educators had a Skype call with refugees in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. The camp houses 179,000 refugees and 55% are children. It has 30 schools, each containing 20 classrooms. We set up a project in which teachers from around the world would teach the Kakuma students using Skype.
During a second call, I taught a group of 10 Kakuma teachers how to install and use Skype. We soon discovered that the schools had very little resources: textbooks were only available at a ratio of 1:10; there were no computers and no power supply. An outreach assistant brought his computer to the class he was teaching and 150 students looked onto the small screen. This made me decide to send them my own laptop with the help of a colleague educator who brought it to the camp himself.
I created a website for Project Kakuma set up with crowd funding, as well as a game called “Jump to Kakuma” which is available on Windows 8, 10 and iOS. All returns from the game are invested in textbooks and devices for the camp. Two months ago I had enough funding to send a laptop, a projector and a sound system.
We are now conducting classes every week through three to five Skype calls. During the calls a global teacher teaches science, math, art, etc. to the student refugees. These past two months the students have had lessons taught by teachers from the USA, Brazil, New Zealand, Belgium, Austria, Portugal, Denmark, India, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Israel and many other countries.
During our 2-day Skype-a-Thon back in December, we managed to connect with Kakuma from all over the world. Our 24 Skype calls resulted in an astonishing 137,833 virtual miles—the equivalent of 5 times the circumference of the earth. Check out our Sway presentation to find out more.
Some fun facts about Project Kakuma:
Mette, a Danish teacher, lets two of her students teach the Kakuma students from time to time.
The project was broadcasted by the Portuguese television and published in Belgian, Portuguese and Danish newspapers.
Joao, a Portuguese teacher, invited a local band to play during a Skype session while he taught the students about art. He builds apps and is currently working on a game called “Water Heroes” of which all returns will go to refugee camps to build water wells.
Those who aren’t able to conduct live calls with Kakuma due to time zone issues record Skype video messages.
Vineeta, an Indian teacher, taught the Kakuma students how to create robot cars and sent some to the refugees.
Why is it so important to do all we can to educate these students? The Kakuma refugees are not able to leave the camp. Through Skype calls, we are unlocking their world. We show that we care and increase their level of education, which then leads to greater chances of a new life away from the camp.
We are currently serving five schools with the help of three outreach assistants. The schools are able to host one call each day until April 2016. If you are an educator and you or your classroom would like to have a call with them, you can schedule it on the Microsoft Educator Community.
This project was created through the collaboration of motivated teachers from all over the world. Without the hard work of Kelli (US), Lena (Denmark), Paula (Finland), Koen (Belgium), Joao (Portugal), Kurt (Austria), Ovi (Spain), and many others, there would be no Project Kakuma.
Big help from a small town. Pennsylvania educator and Skype Master Teacher Michael Soskil was honored as one of 10 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize for his contributions to global citizenship. Through a Skype call with a sister school in a small Kenyan village in Africa, Soskil’s students learned of the village’s unsanitary water conditions that prevented students from going to school. Soskil’s class partnered with students in Kansas and Greece over Skype to help solve the problem and find solutions to provide clean drinking water, not only for the school, but also for many of the families in the village.
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