What is Microsoft Doing in Education?
What does Microsoft offer for education? Lots! Here are a few things to know.
1) Microsoft Teams
Teams is often referred to as a Slack alternative for businesses. What gets overlooked is that EDU accounts have an assignments portion. Go to office.com and click on Teams. You can also get there directly at teams.microsoft.com. Note that your school organization has to be using Microsoft Office 365 to utilize Teams.
On the left side of Teams is an “Assignments” icon. Locate the Create button and choose to create an assignment.
2) PowerPoint Live
From the Microsoft Blog “You can broadcast your PowerPoint presentation over the Internet to a remote audience. While you present the slide show inside PowerPoint, your audience members follow along in their web browsers.”
PowerPoint Live can be found by clicking on the Slide Show portion of the Ribbon. Note: This feature is rolling out so you may not have it yet (I do not have it yet)
3) Immersive Reader
Microsoft is really taking the lead on helping with on screen reading. Immersive Reader not only reads the screen but pops it out into a distraction free environment. Many products, including Pear Deck, integrate with Immersive Reader.
Office Lens iOS (iPhone and iPad) now have the full Immersive Reader, including syllables, parts of speech highlighting, line focus, picture dictionary and translation.
4) OneNote Live Captions
I was visiting the Microsoft campus in November for Hackathon when this concept was born. Pretty cool to see an idea go from concept to fully functioning in such a short period of time. While taking notes in OneNote students can use a join code from the teacher to have what the teacher is saying verbally appear in text in the sidebar of OneNote.
- Captions in 63 languages
- Play/Pause captions
- Highlight captions
- Auto-save captions transcript
MicrosoftEDU
I’ve working with students and teachers on using Office in the classroom. I will be sharing more of what I’m working on and how to use these tools to engage students and improve learning. If your school is using Microsoft tools check out these new and relatively new things you can try with your students.