Professional learning community groups in Office 365 Education
A professional learning community, or PLC, is a group of educators who meet regularly to share expertise and work collaboratively to improve teaching skills and the academic performance of students. Teachers around the world have started using Office 365 Groups to make collaboration within a PLC a lot simpler and more streamlined. PLC groups are typically formed around interest areas (e.g., 9th grade math), grade levels (e.g., 10th grade teachers) or across subjects (e.g., science teachers).
Here are some barriers to engagement with PLCs today that Office 365 Groups is addressing:
•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.
•A challenge for many PLCs is extending the work and relationships in the times and spaces between physically coming together.
•It can be difficult for new teachers to ramp up.
•Information is often stored in personal spaces as opposed to one common place that can benefit others.
•New members need to better understand the journey, story, exploration and history of a PLC, its activities and areas of inquiry.
As part of our April announcement, we mentioned how we are going to further improve our experience for PLCs. Today, we are excited to announce the PLC Groups Preview—tailored to meet the needs of teachers and overcome the above mentioned barriers to engagement today.
The new Office 365 PLC groups include one place to collaborate effectively in a community of practice. Each group comes with a:
•Inbox for group email communication, including Connector for connecting your group to Twitter and following topics or Twitter handles that interest your PLC group.
•Calendar for scheduling group events.
•Document library for storing and working on group files and folders.
•OneNote notebook for taking project and meeting notes.
•Planner for organizing and assigning tasks and getting updates on project progress.
PLC groups are also available on all your mobile devices—both Outlook Groups and OneNote have mobile apps. This helps you keep track of your PLC conversations and PLC notebooks, making it easy to share relevant resources with your groups on the go.
A look at how one district implemented PLC groups
For an in-depth look at how Omaha Public Schools is using Office 365 Groups for their PLCs to streamline collaboration, read their full case study on the Customer Stories page and then watch this video:
Administrators at Omaha Public Schools developed some guidance for their staff on how to do PLCs in their district:
Here’s what Omaha Public Schools staff members have to say about their experience with PLC groups:
“Looking at what Omaha Public Schools’ needs are around professional learning, it was important to build around a platform that was consistent with what our teachers and staff use on a daily basis.”
—Rob Dickson, executive director of Information Management Services for Omaha Public Schools
I love the fact that I can create sections, that I can create pages within the sections, and I can upload anything I want, or do a quick snip from a page and throw it in there. Everyone knows the format, so we’re not trying to figure out somebody else’s way of thinking.”
—Laura Wray, 4th grade teacher at Wakonda Elementary School
“Using our PLC groups, everything is templated out, so you just add to them and it pops up in their Office 365 account and they’re rolling the next day…There’s so much asked of teachers. They can go home at night and say, OK, here’s an activity we did today and it really helped with that comprehension strand, and I want to make sure my teammates get that.”
—Rebecca Chambers, instructional technology coach
Office 365 Groups—integrated to support PLCs
Here is an example of how Office 365 Groups for PLCs integrates Outlook, OneNote and a SharePoint library:
In Outlook on the web, a faculty member chooses the PLC template to create a PLC group.
The PLC group collaborates, shares lesson plans and stores student data all in a shared group OneNote notebook.
The PLC group can store PLC reference material in the group’s document library.
For more information about upcoming improvements to Office 365 Groups for Education, please visit the Office 365 Education Roadmap.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
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Surface + Xbox One Bundle for Students
Starting at $878
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Your portal to productivity
Engineered to be the ultimate classroom companion, you can easily take notes with Surface Pen, or record a lecture with the integrated front-facing and rear-facing 1080p cameras. It'll even convert your handwritten notes to text. Unwind after an intense study session and watch your favorite movie, play your iTunes library, or edit photos of your roommate from vacation on the stunning PixelSense display.
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Unwind after a late-night cram session and stream Xbox One games to your Surface anywhere on campus. Xbox has the best games, TV, movies, music, and sports all in one place, so it's easy to access your favorite apps including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, and more4. And with Xbox Live built into Windows 10, you get access to the greatest gaming community in the world.
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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.
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Office Online—chat with your co-editors in real-time
We recently announced the ability for co-editors to chat with one another directly within a OneDrive document when working in Office Online. Today, we’re pleased to extend this capability to our Office 365 Business and Education customers for documents stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. Built on the same technology as Skype for Business, the new chat feature is available in all the Office Online applications—Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote.
How to initiate a chat
When you share a document from OneDrive or SharePoint Online with your co-workers or classmates, they can view, make edits and even co-author with you in real-time. When multiple people are in the document at the same time, their names appear in the list of co-editors at the top right of the browser window. Next to the list of co-editors, you’ll see a blue Chat button (shown below).
Chat in real-time while working with others in Office Online.
Real-time chat is integrated with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote Online.
Use emoticons to liven up your conversations.
When to chat and when to add document comments
Use Chat when you want to communicate with others immediately, for example, to ask a quick question or divide sections among the co-editors. Chat history is not saved when you close the document but can be copied and pasted if desired. Use Comments (on the Review tab on the ribbon) when you want to attach a comment to a specific selection within the document, such as when you need to ask if a word or phrase should be changed. Comments are saved with the document and can be replied to, marked as done or deleted.
That’s all for now. We’re constantly working to improve Office Online and add new features. Leave a comment below or add new feature suggestions to our UserVoice sites for Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote.
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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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The next phase of Microsoft Academic: intelligent bots at your service!
Progress in AI research and applications is exploding, and that explosion extends to our own team working on academic services. Continuing our work supercharging Bing and Cortana, we are also applying new technologies to Microsoft Academic, which serves the research community. If you’re not familiar with Microsoft Academic, this online destination helps researchers connect with the papers, conferences, people, and ideas that are most relevant, using bots that read, understand, and deliver the scientific news and papers researchers need to further their work.
Designed by and for researchers like myself, the site puts the broadest and deepest set of scientific information at your fingertips, with the ability to go beyond keywords to the contextual meaning of the content. Recently, we further enhanced the analytic content so users can see the latest research, news, and people, ranked by importance and credibility. Users can even drill down on the people, events, and institutions they care most about.
Behind the scenes, we are taking advantage of the fact that machines do not require time to sleep or eat, and have superior memory to humans. We have trained our AI robots to read, classify, and tag every document published to the web in real time. The result is a massive collection of academic knowledge we call the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), which is growing at roughly 1 million articles per week. While one set of robots is busy gathering knowledge from the web, another set of robots is dedicated to analyzing citation behaviors and computing the relative importance of each node in the MAG so that users are always presented with information they need and want.
Microsoft Academic is based on the work our team developed for Microsoft Cognitive Services, including open APIs that give developers AI-based semantic search tools and entity-linking capabilities. We’re also applying AI semantic search—which is contextual and conversational—to Cortana, Bing, and more.
As a research organization, we understand the pivotal role that open communication plays in advancing science. As such, we’re making the back-end dataset and algorithms available to all through Cognitive Services. There, everyone can access and conduct research on the massive and growing dataset through the cloud-based APIs. This means you don’t have to worry about the logistics of transmitting the massive dataset over the Internet, or manage a cluster of computers just to host and analyze the data. We are particularly excited that the research community has taken advantage of these cloud resources and already is collaborating on a common data and benchmarks platform to advance the state of the art. Earlier this year, we saw 81 teams participate in the WSDM Cup 2016 to develop new methods to rank papers, including newly published ones that have yet to receive any citations. An ongoing challenge is the KDD Cup 2016, which is focused on finding a better way to rank the importance of research institutions. The results of the first two stages of the contest have already been published, and I cannot wait to see the final outcomes and learn what new insights and technologies the 500 participating teams have developed when results are announced in August at KDD 2016 in San Francisco!
I encourage you to start experiencing the breadth and depth of what Microsoft Academic currently has to offer and to continue this journey with us in our mission to empower every academic and every academic institution on the planet to achieve more.
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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.
Shellfish farmer Bill Dewey remembers the first year he heard of ocean acidification, a phrase that means a change in chemistry for ocean water. It was around 2008, and Dewey worked for Taylor Shellfish, a company that farms oysters in ocean waters off the coast of Washington. That year, thousands of tiny “seed” oysters died off suddenly. Today, a cloud-based predictive system from the University of Washington (UW) and Microsoft Research may help the shellfish industry survive changing conditions by providing forecasts about ocean water.
Dewey, director of Public Affairs for Taylor Shellfish, vividly remembers walking into a conference room where an audience of shellfish farmers first heard that ocean acidification might threaten their industry profoundly. They learned that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is making ocean water more acidic. In 2013, the Washington legislature stepped in and asked the UW to study and build a predictive forecast model, aptly named, LiveOcean.
Just like a numerical weather forecast model, LiveOcean will soon provide a forecast that predicts the acidity of water in a specific bay, part of Puget Sound or other coastal regions, days in advance.
Parker MacCready, a professor of physical oceanography at UW, is the scientist leading the LiveOcean team and used Microsoft Azure to create the cloud-based storage system. The system holds enormous amounts of data from his remote ocean model, the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), which helps feed the LiveOcean models. The Azure component uses Python and the Django web framework to provide these forecasts in an easy-to-consume format. To produce these forecasts, the LiveOcean system relies on other sources: US Geological Survey data (for river flow), atmospheric forecasts, and another ocean model called HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM).
Dewey needs information on the acidity levels because a baby oyster needs to create a shell immediately to survive, and needs carbonate ions in the water to make that first tiny shell. If the water is too acidic, the baby oyster must use too much energy and dies in its attempt to make that first shell. Taylor Shellfish has hatcheries for the baby oysters and “planting” beds where young oysters are carried to grow to full size. Forecasts of water acidity in both places would help the company know when it was safe to hatch the babies, and where (and when) it is safe to plant them.
Ocean acidification is an emerging global problem, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Scientists are just starting to monitor ocean acidification worldwide, so it is impossible to predict exactly in what ways it will affect the marine environment. In a report, NOAA wrote, “There is an urgent need to strengthen the science as a basis for sound decision making and action.”
Azure tools make the system open to anybody. MacCready is eager to see how others develop sites pulling data on water currents for kayakers, for example, or information for salmon fishers. He is particularly excited about “particle tracking,” which helps him see where individual particles in the ocean move. That tracking could predict where an oil spill might move, for example. Using the cloud is “the way of the future” from his scientific perspective. “It gives the ability to create and use different resources without having to go out and buy hardware yourself.”
Fine-tuning and testing is essential to the reliability of the predictions. In recent years, MacCready and others have been validating the forecasts that LiveOcean is making. They pair real observations from physical instruments to predictions. Within months, he hopes to refine forecasts down to the level of individual bays, so that he can tell Dewey whether Samish Bay or Willapa Bay, for example, is “safe” for the new oysters.
LiveOcean has impacts far beyond just the shellfish industry. Jan Newton, principal oceanographer at the Applied Physics Laboratory, is the co-director of the Washington Ocean Acidification Project (WOAP), believes it may change how the public sees climate change and ocean chemistry.
“Data portals and models like LiveOcean can really make a bridge [of understanding] because even if people don’t understand the chemistry, they’ll look at the color-coding and see how this changes with location and season,” she said. Dewey believes that these tools for the Pacific Ocean chemistry will be adopted by others for oceans worldwide.
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