Digital friend

 

‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’ a well-known proverb says, so I would like to share about my closest digital friend, who really helped me in teaching online and not only once proved its sustainability.

Let me introduce Microsoft Teams, which is the main LMS platform in my classes and even now when we completely moved to offline mode I still use it to provide materials for a flipped classroom, communicate with students, assessing, grading and many more.

Work with MS Teams starts, when the teacher creates groups or teams as they are called in the program and adds students there, in free version of this app you can add all people you want to your team via e-mail, link or manually adding your contacts, but since I use paid version, which our university provides, I only can add those who are already in the database by their surnames and names or student ID number.

The interface reminds Facebook much and would be familiar to students from the first click. They can share everything there from messages to videos, photos, links and react on them with any emojis, which enriches students’ communication both in General and Private chats. Private chat is a great means of communication with students, you immediately get notifications about messages and no need to clog your personal messengers like Telegram or WhatsApp. The opportunity to use emojis or reply/comment ant message or file sent in General Chat really helped me with interaction, for instance, we made voting and chose the winners of the task, which had more “likes-thumb up signs” or positive comments under it. This also can be used for peer-assessment and feedback. One more advantage of MS Teams that there are a lot of popular Apps integrated inside, so you can possibly do everything without even leaving Teams.

 

It also has a ‘spying’ function showing in Assignments, who of students viewed the assigned task and did not bother to complete it, so the excuses like “I did not see the task”, “I forgot”, “My device did not work” are senseless with the status “Viewed”.

If you have the same Assignment for different classes, it can be sent to multiple classes at once, instead of creating it separately for each one, the same with messages in General Chat or stream, which is very convenient and time-saving with the routine announcements. In case you want to send the task only to an individual or several students, but not the whole class, you just select and tick the “lucky students” and it goes only to them and the rest of the group do not see and do not get notifications about a new assignment.

 

After you graded students, all points appear in order, next to the students’ names and at the end of the semester it really eases the process of assessment and even more time-saving, you can export all grades to Excel. By the way, all desktop Office apps are incorporated, but only in the paid version.

There are a lot of background settings for the synchronous conferences, where the time is unlimited. Breakout Rooms, Share Screen, Meeting recording, reactions and chat are available. The only thing, when I used an integrated Whiteboard there, students were complaining that it takes much time till the content uploads or some students even struggled to open whiteboard itself and before they just see a black screen, so when, at last, it is uploaded the information is not relevant anymore or participation is not necessary, because the activity had already been finished.

 

Another disadvantage is file storage very confusing, if you want to find any file, no guarantee you will find it that day, next or ever, it is like to look for a needle in a haystack.

Although, there are still some cons of MS Teams platform it is quite a big canvas, where I can create my blended learning space, which is more effective for modern generation students as “the evolving symbiosis of te
chnology with traditional pedagogical approaches, facilitating content richness, flexible content access and  alternative communication channels,  may benefit  the learning  process (Nikolaidou et al., 2010).

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References:

Nikolaidou, M., Sofianopoulou, C., Alexopoulou, N., Abeliotis, K., Detsis, V., Chalkias, C., Lasaridi, K. and Anagnostopoulos, D. (2010). The Blended Learning Ecosystem of an Academic Institution in Greece. International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies, 5 (3), 14-35. Available from 10.4018/jwltt.2010070102.