Reading Progress in Teams

Yesterday my Year 9 Spanish class submitted their Reading Progress assignment on Teams, whereby they read their winter oral exam aloud and Teams gave colour-coded feedback on the accuracy of their pronunciation. I was able to go into each response and listen to their recording whilst following on the screen and edit Teams’ feedback very quickly and easily, clicking on words which I disagreed with. It was quick and easy to do, and let me see common recurring issues as well as who needs more or less support. I think that Year 9 will find it useful as they come to do the actual oral exam in a fortnight, as this should reduce the number of marks they lose for pronunciation.

Adding a class notebook page to an assignment in MS Teams

I am a massive fan of MS Teams. This year I have started to use the integrated class notebook more with my classes. It makes it much easier to mark using digital inking and means the pupils have their work assembled in one place online. There are, I am sure, many different ways to approach this but here's what I do if I have a particular page I want all pupils to complete as part of an assignment: 1)Add a page to your Teacher only section or to the Content Library in the class notebook. The Teacher Only section is private from the pupils whereas the Content Library is a read-only section for them. I think of this as a digital textbook.

2) Go to the MS Team for that class and click on the Assignments tab then click on Create (bottom left) or the + sign (top right) depending on the device you are using. Then select 'Add resources'

3) Select Class notebook and choose the page you added in step 1) then click 'Attach'

4) Choose the student section where you wish this assignment to go and click 'done'

It's as easy as that. When the pupils have submitted the work, you go in through the assignment and click through each pupil's name, clicking on the MS OneNote link each time.

Teams and MeetNow in the age of coronavirus

Two Year 13 pupils had messaged to say that they wouldn't be in class today for our triple period on the Spanish film. I asked them if they wanted to join us via MeetNow on Teams and they agreed to. We had a few hitches. The Meet button is on the browser but I couldn't see it on the Teams app on my iPad or my phone. A quick query in the always useful c2k Getting to know Teams post primary group and the brilliant Donna Vaughan from c2k pointed me in the right direction as you need to go to your calendar within Teams and start a new event. This allows you to give it a title and put it in the right channel.

The two pupils joined using the link on Teams and I then told them to turn off their cameras and their mics, unless they wanted to say or ask something, and we proceeded with the lesson. It was useful as this is a hard topic to catch up on if you miss it. The downside was that they couldn't hear their peers as easily as me, given that I was beside the iPad and they were socially distanced from me in the classroom. However, all in all, it was a worthwhile first go and definitely worth it from a learning perspective.