03. Finding your way around MS Teams

Well done for getting this far!

If you’ve made it to the following screen, then you are ready for this guide which talks you through the basics of how Barnes Primary School is using Teams for educational purposes.

The school is still in the process of rolling out the functionality, so not all aspects of Teams are being used yet. This guide will be updated with additional sections when each new function starts to be used.

This is the screen you will see after you have successfully logged in:

If you have used Teams for work: then this will be quite familiar to you but there are some differences to take note of as this is Teams for Education and it’s been customised for use by schools and students.
Most of the same concepts still apply but please take a look through anyway.

The attached general guide to the MS Teams interface is a helpful summary of everything you’ll be able to see. So take a quick look at this first then continue this guide so you understand which parts of Teams the school is currently using:

TeamsforEducation_QuickGuide BPS v1

The school has created areas for each class; these areas are known as ‘Teams’.
On the home screen you can see an icon for the class your child is in. Click on it and you’ll see the following screen:

Here are a few things you should notice:

• You start off in the ‘General’ channel, on the ‘Posts’ page. If you scroll up, you’ll see the lovely welcome message!
• There are channels for each subject, you’ll only see the first few; to see the rest, click on the link for ‘hidden channels’.
• You can see who is logged in by looking at the top right of the screen. This might be important if you have more than one child.

Key terms:

• A ‘Team’ is an area grouping lots of channels, each class is a Team and each child has access to only one Team.
• A ‘Channel’ is an area within a Team that groups together all the conversations about a subject like ‘Music’ or ‘Maths’.
• The ‘General’ channel is an area for discussions for the whole class about non-subject specific topics.
• The ‘Posts’ area is where all the children and teachers can type messages, send pictures or files etc. It’s a bit like a WhatsApp group.

The Posts area is great for general messages but if your child wants to say something to their teacher that everyone else can’t see, they should email the teacher using their school email account.  They can access this from the web browser (or any normal email client).  The easiest way is to click the grid of dots in the top left of the Teams screen and click ‘Outlook’:

The teacher and class will share files with one another and this is done with the ‘Files’ section.
Click on ‘Files’ at the top of the screen to see the following:

Notes:

• The Files area is open to everyone, so all class children and the teachers will be able to see all the files in there
• Your child can select one or more files, then click ‘Download’ to download them to your computer
• Your child can also upload files here as well, remember everyone can see this area so its probably not the place to attach completed work (please see ‘Assignments’ below)
• If you send ‘Posts’ with a file as an attachment, the file your child attaches will appear here as well as in the Posts section
• Each class group will soon have some files available in this section containing the first 3 days of work.  Don’t worry if it’s not yet there for your class … hold tight, it is coming!

Your child’s class teacher will set assignments for the class in the Assignments section.  This is shown in the ‘General’ channel.

Click Teams, click into your Class, click General, click Assignments to see the following screen:

Notes

• You can also click ‘Assignments’ on the left hand side
• All assignments for the class in every subject can be viewed here
• Follow the instructions for the assignment to complete it
• Over the next week, the school will be working through how the Assignments section will be used by class teachers.  For the first few days though, work has simply been uploaded to the ‘Files’ section