Preventing Azure Active Directory terms of use from blocking Intune enrollment

by Contributed | May 4, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

By Wayne Bennett – Sr Program Manager | Microsoft Endpoint Manager – Intune

Using Microsoft Endpoint Manager – Microsoft Intune to set your company’s terms and conditions meets the requirements of many organizations. However, the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) terms of use feature offers greater functionality— including terms of use in different languages and integration with Conditional Access in the form of grant controls. You can learn more about the differences between the two solutions in this blog post.

Potential to block access to Intune

If you’ve configured the Azure AD terms of use solution and set a grant control to require users to accept terms of use in your Conditional Access policy, you need to be aware of a configuration scenario that might unintentionally block access for your users when they try to enroll into Intune.

Typical configuration

When creating an Azure AD terms of use policy, you have the option to select Require users to consent on every device. If you choose this setting, you will see the Consent on every device will require users to register each device with Azure AD prior to getting access warning. Once saved, you are unable to change this setting.

Example screenshot to register each device with Azure AD prior to getting access in a Conditional Access policy

After you create the terms of use policy, the next step is to create a Conditional Access policy. As shown in the following example, many organizations will target All Cloud Apps without configuring any exclusions.

Example screenshot of targeting All cloud apps in a Conditional Access policy

Additionally, many organizations will select Require device to be marked as compliant grant controls and require users to accept the Azure AD terms of use policy.

Example screenshot of configuring both the “Require device to be marked as compliant” and “Terms of Use” policies under the Grant control

Blocking enrollment issue

The combination of Azure AD terms of use requiring users to consent on every device, Conditional Access policy targeting All Cloud Apps, and the control requiring the user to accept the Azure AD terms of use results in the following unintended behaviour during the Intune enrollment process:

• Once the user has authenticated in the Company Portal, prior to Azure AD terms of use appearing, the Help us keep your device secure message will appear. The user will be prompted to install the Microsoft Authenticator app, Conditional Access controls will begin a continuous registration cycle, and the user will be unable to complete enrollment.

The issue is caused by selecting Require users to consent on every device, requiring users to register each device with Azure AD prior to getting access, as per the warning, when creating the terms of use policy.

Example screenshot of the “Help us keep your device secure” message

Prevent Intune enrollment from being blocked

There are two methods to keep the enrollment blocking scenario from occurring:

Method 1: The Terms of use dialog

The first method is to ensure that Require users to consent on every device in the Terms of use dialog remains at the default Off setting when creating the Azure AD terms of use policy.

Note

Once the Azure AD terms of use policy is created, it is not possible to edit the Require users to consent on every device setting. You must create and target a new terms of use policy in the Conditional Access policy.

Method 2: Exclude cloud apps

The second method is to exclude certain cloud apps from Conditional Access targeting. The Per-device terms of use section of the Azure Active Directory terms of use documentation states that “The Intune Enrollment app is not supported. Ensure that it is excluded from any Conditional Access policy requiring Terms of Use policy.” However, excluding the Microsoft Intune Enrollment cloud app is not sufficient— as the example below shows, you must also exclude the Microsoft Intune cloud app.

Example screenshot of excluding “Microsoft Intune” and “Microsoft Intune Enrollment” from the Cloud apps or actions list

Conclusion

Changing your configuration using either of the suggested methods will prevent the Intune enrollment blocking scenario. Before you make any change, be sure to evaluate the settings so you don’t impact any existing Conditional Access requirements.

More info and feedback

For further resources on this subject, please see the links below.

Plan an Azure Active Directory Conditional Access Deployment

Troubleshoot Conditional Access using the What If tool

What is Microsoft Intune

Conditional Access require terms of use

Cloud apps or actions in Conditional Access policy

Device compliance policies in Microsoft Intune

Let us know if you have any additional questions by replying to this post or reaching out to @IntuneSuppTeam  on Twitter.

Reading Progress in Microsoft Teams – Improve student reading fluency, save time and track progress

by Contributed | May 4, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

After a year of practicing resiliency, building technology and self-management skills, and navigating  emotional turmoil, students are preparing to return to a rigorous school experience without some of the skills they would have built in a normal year. A recent study from Stanford illustrated the flattened growth of Oral Reading Fluency during the pandemic. In a broad sample of districts, second and third graders performed about 30 percent behind expectations, with the most severe impact concentrated in already struggling schools. In an environment of continued disruption and uncertainty, we are excited to introduce Reading Progress as a resource to help build opportunities for students and educators to get back on track in a non-stigmatizing and highly customizable way.
 

Reading Progress in Teams supports students in building fluency through independent reading practice, educator review, and educator insights.  Educators can upload a single reading fluency assignment or differentiate for their class’ many levels. Students read their passages out loud, creating an audio/video recording teachers can access and review at their convenience.  Traditionally, tracking students’ fluency is irregular and time consuming because it requires one on one close listening, while somehow still managing the remainder of the class. Creating recordings allows educators to check students’ progress more regularly while also freeing up time for active instruction. By empowering students to complete their reading fluency assignments regularly and independently, Reading Progress keeps the focus on practice and growth, not performing under pressure. Now reading fluency practice can happen anywhere!

Whether educators used the Auto-detect feature for quick review, or manually code errors, valuable data is collected in Insights. Teams Education Insights dashboards help visualize class and individual progress. Insights provides a holistic view of trends and data including accuracy rate, correct words per minute, mispronunciations, omissions and insertions. Reading Progress also highlights actionable insights for educators including common challenges across the entire class or per student. 

During our broad private preview, Reading Progress has been tested in a number of distinct use cases. We’ve seen the expected wide usage for ages 6-11 as well as utilization for middle and high school fluency checks, special education and dyslexia support, and for building English skills for non-native speakers, both in English dominant areas and where it’s taught as world language.  We’ve also seen high interest for adult literacy scenarios. The stigma of reading out loud and lack of educator time has previously made consistent fluency practice in post-elementary education settings minimal.  The implications of a private and regular space for older learners to practice fluency are immense.  Here are two observations from some educators who have been part of the early private preview:

Joe Merrill, an educator from Lake Park Elementary, Florida, has been using Reading Progress in our private preview over the past few months with his class and he has this to say “Reading Progress takes all the nerves out of my student’s fluency checks. They are comfortable with its approach and I am able to collect data quicker and more efficiently than ever before. Now, I can devote more time to differentiated instruction rather than individualized assessments.”

Luis Oliviera, Director of Unified Arts and ELA from Middletown High School in Middletown, RI , has been using Reading Progress with his older English Language Learner students and has this to say: “Reading Progress has been such a time saver for assessing and analyzing my high school ELL students’ reading fluency. I am able to give a passage to the entire class and have them record their responses instead of having to individually assess the students. Cultural selections for the reading passages enhance their knowledge of important topics and current events. This allows more time to work directly with the students in addressing their needs.”

From the beginning, the creation and testing of this tool has been a and has been rooted in the science and literature of reading fluency. Our team has worked with hundreds of educators, literacy specialists and reading scientists. Early on, we had many interviews, brainstorming sessions and “design jams” with experts like Shaelynn Farnsworth, Lauren Taylor, Andrew Fitzgerald, Lauren Pittman, amongst many others.  We’ve consulted with students, iterated on different designs, and have much more in store! 

Four parts to the Reading Progress experience

1) Assignment creation – Reading Progress is built directly into the free Teams Assignments experience.  Once an educator selects Create>Assignment, the Add resource button now includes Reading Progress (Beta) for the private beta group. The educator then completes the creation of the assignment, including uploading the Word document of their choice. This summer educators can look forward to the addition of PDF capabilities and a partnership with  ReadWorks  that includes a small library of curated reading passages. The educator can also manually set the Reading Level, Number of attempts, Genre, and Sensitivity. I call this the “picky dial” – how picky would you like the software to be. For example, younger readers may need more relaxed pronunciation expectations, while older readers might be set to higher sensitivity.  Note that this can be changed during the review experience as well.

2) Student reading and recording: When students receive the Reading Progress assignment, they open it to see a recording experience. By default, video recording will be enabled, but teachers can approve audio-only if needed.  Similar to Flipgrid, the student will start the recording, get a countdown, and then the reading passage will open for the student to read. 

We’ve integrated aspects of the Immersive Reader into this experience to support students in  customizing the way the passage looks before they start reading.

3) Educator review: One of the most powerful aspects for Reading Progress is the quick and easy review process, which simultaneously returns work to students and collects fluency data in Insights. This experience is built-in to the Teams grading and review experience. The review page pulls together the student’s reading recording, words per minute count, accuracy rate, and the ability to fine tune pronunciation sensitivity. 

By default, the Auto-Detect feature is enabled, so you will see predicted mispronunciations, omissions, insertions, self-corrections, and repetitions. The educator can review the Auto-correct data, overriding any inaccuracies, or turn off Auto-detect to mark up the page manually as they listen to the recording, similar to how reading fluency checks are done with paper and pen.  To account for different speech patterns and accents, the educator can change the pronunciation sensitivity analyzes results to make teacher review faster and more accurate. In addition, with a single click the educator can jump to any part of the recording to review detected words or passages.

4) Powerful insights to track student progress:  Fluency data from Reading Progress is collected in Insights to support educators in taking evidence-based action for literacy in their classrooms. Insights dashboards help visualize progress and trends such as accuracy rate, correct words per minute, mispronunciations, omissions, and insertions. Reading Progress also highlights actionable insights for educators, synthesizing common challenges across the entire class or per student.  Educators can share Insights dashboard access to collaborate with literacy coaches, speech pathologists, and reading specialists and more to holistically curate student-centered approaches.

Later this summer education leaders will be able to access Reading Progress data by opting into our new Education Insights Premium designed to compile organization-wide data for intentional and impactful leadership. which is designed for school leaders and organization-wide views.  To learn more about this new Insights offering, visit the Education Insights Premium page.

Average words per minute and accuracy across a class or by student

Word cloud of most challenging word across a class or by student

A Reading Progress end-to-end demo

We’ve put together a support materials as well as an end-to-end video showing the details of how the entire Reading Progress experience works in Teams for Education:

Kate Griggs, founder of CEO of Made by Dyslexia, has had access to our early versions of Reading Progress and has this to say “Reading Progress is a FANTASTIC resource for teachers of, and children with dyslexia. Reading aloud is something dyslexic students really struggle with and literally dread doing, even in small groups or 1:1 with a teacher. Reading Progress offers a great way for dyslexic students to demonstrate what they can do, without feeling embarrassed or nervous. This will be a game changer”. 

Next Steps:

Reading Progress is currently in wide private testing with thousands of educators and is supported on Desktop, web, Mac, iOS and Android.  We are actively listening to educator and student feedback and updating and improving the tool regularly to meet your needs.  We will continue adding more schools to our private preview, and anticipate having Reading Progress at General Availability by late August of 2021, in time for back to school (Northern Hemisphere).

We have many improvements coming this summer, including support for PDF upload, iOS and Android video, a sample content library from ReadWorks, and the highly requested integration and roll up into Education Insights Premium. This will allow schools and districts to aggregate and roll up Reading Progress data into broader dashboards and analytics through the just-announced Education Insights Premium offering.

We also have a new Reading Progress page on the Microsoft Educator Center, and a MEC course coming later this summer.

A huge THANK YOU to all of the educators, students, and reading experts who have worked with us and given us feedback along this exciting journey. We look forward to collaborating with you as we continue!

Mike Tholfsen

Principal Product Manager

Microsoft Education

Using Microsoft Whiteboard for Education

by Contributed | May 4, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Today, on the Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 product announcement blogs, we announced a number of new features that are coming to Microsoft Whiteboard this summer, specifically for our education users. If you are an educator looking to keep your students more engaged, or if you haven’t checked out Whiteboard in a while, keep reading! 

Microsoft Whiteboard is a visually rich and interactive education tool that supports creative teaching and learning. With its infinite canvas and focus on teamwork, Whiteboard provides a place for teachers and students to develop ideas together in an ad hoc or in a formulated way, whether the class is taught remotely, in hybrid mode, or in person. 

Create Visually Engaging Class Material 

We understand that one of the hardest things for an educator to do, is to keep a student’s attention throughout the class. Microsoft Whiteboard gives you tools to create beautifully engaging content for your class. Coming this summer to our Whiteboard web client and Whiteboard in Teams app, you’ll be able to pull in images, content from other documents, shapes, and stickers to add fun and life to your lessons. You can save time by creating the boards ahead of class and then simply opening the previously created whiteboard during class to get going. 

Focused, Dynamic Lessons 

Microsoft Whiteboard can help your class get focused on the right things. Right now, educators have full control over who can edit the whiteboard and when. Annotate over your lesson with digital ink, highlighters, stickers, sticky notes, and text boxes for special emphasis. This summer, you will also be able to use the laser pointer to draw attention to important concepts. As whiteboards are inherently non-linear, you have the flexibility to dynamically change the flow of the lesson depending on the conversations that come up and where those discussions take you. For a more guided experience, you will be able to lock your students’ view so that they see what you see. Run your lessons with a video conferencing application like Microsoft Teams for the best experience. 

Group Projects and Interactive Lessons 

When it comes to group projects and interactive lessons, you may want a little more structure. This summer, Microsoft Whiteboard will make it simpler to upload digital worksheets that you already have to the board, or create new ones using structured organizers that will come with the app. Add your content to the board, open it in a Teams meeting, or invite your students to the board and see their creativity blossom. With everyone on the same Whiteboard, live cursor identities will allow you to see where students are, who is actively engaged with the work, and which students might need additional help or clarification on the tasks. 

Keep Focused with Microsoft Teams 

If you use Microsoft Teams in your classrooms, life just got easier as Microsoft Whiteboard is directly built into Teams. While in a Teams meeting, open the share tray to share a new or an existing Whiteboard with the class at any time without needing to switch between apps and without losing the participant video feeds and context. This saves you time, keeps everyone focused on the lesson, and allows you to stay connected with the class. This feature is available right now. 

Assignments 

All those Whiteboard lessons you created, whether previously prepared or created through ad hoc discussions, are now even more useful as they can be uploaded to Teams Assignments as homework or reference material. Assignments in Teams will duplicate the whiteboards for you and students can submit their work for grading when they are done. Whiteboard is especially useful with Microsoft Teams’ new Group Assignments feature as it allows students to work and create together in real-time. 

Microsoft Whiteboard is an intuitive app that students can quickly grasp. Pick up and draw with a pen, finger, or mouse, or select something from the toolbar to add, which means that students can spend their time on adding creative content as opposed to learning the tool. The wide range of tools from adding simple reaction stickers to creating full blown works of art, means that students can choose the level of engagement they’re comfortable with. Microsoft Whiteboard is available on Windows, iOS, Android, and the Microsoft Whiteboard web client. 

Continue the conversation by joining us in the Microsoft 365 Tech Community! Whether you have product questions or just want to stay informed with the latest updates on new releases, tools, and blogs, Microsoft 365 Tech Community is your go-to resource to stay connected! 

35+ new features in Teams to get excited about now through August

by Contributed | May 4, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day! This means YOU—whether you’re an educator, school leader, or family member teaching from home, in a hybrid classroom, in-person, or anywhere in between. We know it’s taken all your superpowers to light the way through this year for your students and we want to take a moment to celebrate all you’ve accomplished.. May the Fourth be with you. ;)

Each day you make learning fun, create “a ha!” moments from scratch, and empower your students to achieve more. That’s our mission too at Microsoft Education, and we’re proud to be on your team. Speaking of Teams, we have a lot of cool new things to share—over 35, in fact! All of these updates and features would not be possible without your feedback—thank you, truly, for sharing what you and your classrooms need. We’ve linked everything so you can discover at your own pace and skip to the features and announcements that interest you most.

Let’s do this!

Just click on the quick links below to navigate to a section:

1. Personalize learning for each and every student (and save time for yourself)


2. A little organizational improvement that will make a big difference in Teams


3. Make Assignments more engaging and fun…and easier for you, too!


4. Better understand student engagement and emotional well-being with Education Insights


5. Encourage class participation during synchronous learning for better hybrid and remote classes


6. Improve connection and collaboration with Microsoft, Teams, and your LMS together


7. Help keep students safe with more options and controls for chat, policies, and meetings in Teams


8. Make class recordings easier with Microsoft Stream

Or, click here to read the full list with no extras.

1) Personalize learning for each and every student

Reading Progress
Hundreds of educators and school leaders have shared the challenges and importance of reading fluency checks with us. After collaborating with reading experts and testing with educators, we’re excited to announce Reading Progress. Whether educators are helping emerging readers build confidence or teaching English as a foreign language, Reading Progress enables readers to practice their skills in a safe, student-centric environment. Educators pick a reading passage and can choose to assign it to the entire class, a specific reading group, or an individual student. After the student reads the passage aloud, educators review the recording and either manually identify and code errors or use the Auto-detect feature to identify and code potential errors. The recordings grant students and educators more flexibility to practice remotely or in the classroom. This helps bring the right support at the right time to each learner and makes it easier to plan regular reading fluency checks.

Fluency data from Reading Progress is collected in Insights to support educators in taking evidence-based action for literacy in their classrooms. Insights dashboards help visualize progress and trends such as accuracy rate, correct words per minute, mispronunciations, omissions, and insertions. Reading Progress also highlights actionable insights for educators, synthesizing common challenges across the entire class or per student. Learn more.

When: End of August

Career Coach
The journey from higher education to career can be challenging. Introducing Career Coach, a Microsoft Teams app powered by LinkedIn, that provides personalized guidance for higher education students to navigate their career journey. Career Coach uses an AI-based skill identifier and LinkedIn integration that aligns a student’s comprehensive profile with job market trends. Students can discover their career path, grow real-world skills, and build their network as they make progress towards their goals. Education institutions gain insight to enhance the student experience, improve student success, and drive employment outcomes. Learn more.

When: May

Immersive Reader
Students are using whatever tools are at hand, like literally. Mobile devices’ function as education and accommodation tools is about to get an upgrade – for free! Immersive Reader, which uses proven customization techniques to support reading across ages and abilities, is coming to Teams iOS and Android for mobile. Currently, Immersive Reader has 35 million monthly active users across Microsoft apps and partner platforms. With Teams’ addition of Immersive Reader for iOS and Android, students can access content with the support they need, improving learning outcomes no matter where they are reading from. Learn more.

When: July

Math app for Teams for Education
The Teams Math Input Extension allows easy math discussions and conversations for students and educators on any math topic using camera images, advanced math keyboard, and handwriting inputs. The app can also provide targeted coaching when students are stuck, while the graphing calculator provides visualizations for functions. To install the Math app, make sure your IT administrator has enabled it and then head to the Apps tab on the left side of Teams and search for “Math.” Learn more.

When: Available now

2) A little organizational improvement that will make a big difference in Teams

Simplified navigation in your class team
We’ve heard loud and clear that you’d prefer to access Assignments, Grades, Class Notebook and Insights from any channel within a class team. We’re excited to announce changes to the class team layout that will allow you to do just that! Just open up your class team and you’ll see the updated-and-improved navigation. Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to add tabs to the General channel and other channels you create. This new view will be available for all educators and students using our grid view layout for teams, and IT Admins will have the option to remove any of the pre-pinned navigation.

When: August

3) Make Assignments more engaging and fun…and easier for you, too!

Group assignments
With the new group assignment feature, groups of students can work together to create, collaborate, and submit one assignment for the whole group. You’ll be able to either give individual comments and grades or group grades, and all students in the group will receive credit.

When: End of August

Add assignments to Office 365 calendar
Stay on top of due dates and classwork by turning on calendar sync for Teams assignments. This is a setting that educators can select for individual assignments or turn on in Assignments Settings for their whole class. Once toggled on, the calendar feature adds an entry at the due date and time for that assignment on Teams and Outlook calendars for both educators and students. Now you can see all of the important things coming up in one place!

When: May

Apps in assignments
Got an EDU app you love—one that really helps create that “ah-ha” moment for student learning? Soon you’ll be able to assign interactive apps as part of an assignment, saving you time while opening up more engaging assignment options. Here are just a few of the apps that will be available: Buncee, Dugga, Nearpod, BookWidgets, School Day, Flat, Whiteboard.chat, Loops, and Wakelet.

When: End of August

Whiteboard assignments
Educators will soon be able to add Microsoft whiteboards to assignments. Previously created whiteboards can be added to assignments as reference material or they can be duplicated for an individual or a group of students to complete and submit. Alternatively, assign a blank whiteboard to unleash student creativity.

When: End of August

Assignment limit increase to 300 students
If you’re teaching or lecturing to a large class, we’ve got you covered. You’ll soon be able to distribute an assignment to 300 students instead of 200 (with additional increases to come.)

When: June

Snap a photo and submit
We’ve heard from many educators that it’s often simpler for students to snap a quick picture on their phones of their work. Now, the new Lens integration in Assignments allows students to take a picture of their paper, whiteboard, or other physical work with their mobile device and turn it in. It’s a snap.

When: May

Send grade data automatically to your Student Information System
Educators should not have to copy and paste grades – ever. Grade Sync is the time-saving solution within Teams Assignments that automatically sends grades you enter to your Student Information System (SIS) gradebook. We now support syncing to OneRoster v1.1 compliant providers including verified providers: Aequitas, eSchoolData, Infinite Campus, PowerSchool, and Skyward. Aeries, Synergy and SIMS coming soon. Learn More.

When: Available now

Create and edit a quiz directly from an assignment
We’ve streamlined the experience of creating, editing, and assigning quizzes in Teams. Now, you can create your entire quiz without leaving Teams, no extra windows or tabs needed! This means you can add a time limit for your quiz right from Teams, too. The timer will begin as soon as your student starts the quiz. If you need to make an edit later on, quizzes can be updated directly from Teams Assignments.

When: Easy Forms editing expected in May, timer expected in August

Share a OneNote Class Notebook page as a read-only resource
Sometimes an educator just needs to share reference material for students to read, but not edit. No need to make copies of the instructions or worry about students editing documents. Now you can distribute a read-only resource page directly from the Content Library.

When: Available now

4) Better understand student engagement and emotional well-being with Education Insights

Education Insights
Ever wonder if you could look behind the curtain and understand how students are engaging in your class? Now, with Education Insights built directly into your digital classroom, you can. Make informed instructional decisions with data such as online class attendance, assignment engagement, class activity, and more. Education Insights grants educators a powerful lens to support students on a whole new level. Learn more.

When: Available now

Reflect app helps you understand how students are feeling
Reflect is a check-in tool that educators can leverage to open conversations about Social Emotional Learning, or simply take the temperature of their class. Educators deepen their awareness of each student’s emotional experience, informing their practice. With emoji-based check-ins, students are prompted to name their emotions, supporting emotional vocabulary growth and self-awareness skills vital to their understanding of how emotions impact learning. Plus, educators get better insight into the needs of the class and individual students.

Through Education Insights, educators can see how students respond to check-ins over time, making it easier to identify and address student needs. The digital activity report now includes Reflect check-in data, with additional Reflect insights coming soon. Learn more.

When: Available now (with improvements coming!)

New! Insights is on mobile with Spotlight cards
Educators are on the move. That’s why we now have Insights available on mobile. Quickly view Spotlights that detail your class engagement. Just open your class and select Insights to see key stories pulled from engagement data to help you identify trends and take action for student success. For example, if a student was inactive (and your chat is enabled), you can quickly choose to send a chat to the student to ask how they’re doing and whether they need additional help.

When: July

Check engagement with OneNote Class Notebook
You’ve asked; it’s here! Now educators can gain insights into how students are engaging with their OneNote Class Notebooks–specifically which pages students have edited and created. If you’re using OneNote Class Notebook now for notes, homework, or assignments and want to check it out for yourself, just head to the Insights tab in your class, click on Digital Activity, and filter All Activities by OneNote. You can sort by most active and least active from here.

When: Available now

New Insights for educational leaders and supporting staff
Successful students need the support of the entire school and institution community. Faculty and staff such as department heads, program directors, speech therapists, and more all contribute to students’ educational communities.

These roles are innovating to find ways to better understand and act on student academic performance and emotional well-being. Coming soon, Education Insights will offer an integrated, secure solution for educational leaders and support staff that will help measure student progress over time, provide thorough data and analytics for every student, and share personalized tools that can help increase specific skills, such as reading or language.

This premium solution provides educational leaders and supporting staff the tools to understand the dynamics in a school, subject, or grade level so they can hold more meaningful and relevant conversations with educators to support learning. Leverage stats on what’s working well and why to create and share best practices with the educators at your institution.

With an organizational view of how the institution is performing, you increase the return on your existing technology investments and replicate success stories across schools, districts, or institutions.

To get the most out of this premium version of Insights, School Data Sync (SDS) will further evolve to include a variety of new data elements, including an option to provide all data synchronized via SDS to the Insights application for enhanced reporting and analytics capabilities. For example, you’ll be able to tag special programs or students with learning differences and then filter for these tags to assess if their needs are met.

Visit this page to learn more about this new premium experience and how to plan your SDS integration with Education Insights.

When: July

5) Encourage class participation during synchronous learning for better hybrid and remote classes

Multiple choice quizzes in Teams meetings
Want to quiz your students during online class? You can now create multiple choice quizzes, powered by Forms Polls in Teams meetings, to engage your students. Create your own knowledge check questions, or try out our intelligent poll and answer choice suggestions that help take care of some of the legwork. As students take the quiz, you get real-time insights that can be used to adjust instruction and support individual students—pretty cool!

When: May

Channel meeting support for Microsoft Forms Polls
Polls and Quizzes in Teams meetings are now in channel meetings, too! We appreciate all your feedback pushing for this change, so we made it happen. This includes the ability to launch multiple choice quizzes directly from your channel meeting, as described above.
When: August

Digital whiteboarding in Teams meetings
Microsoft Whiteboard complements your Teams meeting experience by providing an inclusive, visual, and easy-to-use tool that helps you build and deliver rich and engaging lessons. In fact, Whiteboard is built directly into Teams, making either ad hoc sessions or previously prepared whiteboard lessons simple to launch. While in a Teams meeting, open the share tray to share a new or existing Whiteboard with the class at any time without needing to switch between apps and or losing the participant video feeds and context. This saves you time, keeps everyone focused on the lesson, and allows you to stay connected with the class.

Once you have your Whiteboard open, annotate your lesson with digital ink, highlighters, stickers, sticky notes, and text boxes for special emphasis. Educators have full control over who can edit the whiteboard so that you can confidently use it for presentations, interactive lessons, and group projects. Use the laser pointer to draw attention to certain concepts. For a more guided experience, you can lock your students’ view so that they only see what you see.

With everyone on the same whiteboard, live cursor identities allow you to see where students are, who is actively engaged with the work, and pinpoint students who might need additional help or clarification on the tasks.

When: August

To learn more about Microsoft Whiteboard, check out our Whiteboard for Education Tech Community Blog.

Dynamic view
Dynamic view intelligently arranges content and participants during class, showing the important stuff all on the same screen. Comments from the meeting chat will show up, too, giving more visibility to students who would rather use chat to share their thoughts and ideas. This capability can also assist participants with hearing impairments: They can use Dynamic view to spotlight their sign language interpreter alongside shared content. Need to resize your meeting window? No problem. The participant gallery auto-adjusts as you go.

When: May

Presenter mode
Presenter mode gives educators the option to choose how video and content appear to students during class.

• Standout shows your video feed to participants in front of the shared content


• Reporter displays content as a visual aid above your shoulder


• Side-by-side displays your video feed next to your content

These different modes helps create a more natural classroom or lecture experience and allows students to see their teacher or professor alongside content!

When: expected May

Breakout room updates, including participant retention and room reassignment
Now, it’s quicker to manage your meetings with students and get every student into the right breakout room. Organizers can reassign participants to rooms whether they are open or closed, so you can move students without closing rooms first.. We know many classrooms work in the same group configurations over and over again, so it’s now possible to set up groups and then reuse them for future breakout room sessions, saving you time during a busy day of teaching and learning.

When: Available now

Present to Teams
Presenting in a class used to be as simple as clicking Slide Show in your PowerPoint deck. Today, you may not be in the same room as your audience, but we believe your steps to start presenting should be just as easy and intuitive. Clicking the Present in Teams button in PowerPoint is the only step you need to launch a presentation directly in a Teams meeting—just one click! Learn more.

When: June

One thousand person interactive meetings and webinars
Soon Microsoft Teams will support interactive meetings and webinars for up to 1,000 attendees, including rich presentation options, live reactions, and moderation controls to disable chat, audio, and video for the attendees of the event. This will be available for Microsoft Education A3 and A5 customers.

When: May

Better web experiences for online classes
We know that for many students, it’s easier (or necessary) to join their classes, courses, or meetings via their web browser. Soon that experience will improve by leaps and bounds, with many of the top- rated Teams meetings capabilities coming soon to the Chrome and Edge browsers. These improvements include:

• Together mode and Large gallery view so you have the option to see and interact with larger groups and feel more like you’re together in one space.


• A 2×2 video grid display that shows automatically when there is more than one participant attending class.


• Background blur and customized backgrounds to make learning equitable and put individual student personalities on display.


• Live reactions so students can show they’re listening, or respond to each other with a live emoji.

When: End of August

6) Improve connection and collaboration with Microsoft, Teams, and your LMS together

Microsoft is working with leading Learning Management System partners to ensure that educators and students have a seamless experience when using our combined solutions for teaching and learning. Here are two updates that will support collaboration and communication within everyday LMS workflows.

Access your class teams from your Canvas and Blackboard
Teams plays an important role in student-educator collaboration, but up until now there has been no easy way for educators to create a team for their LMS course. That’s about to change: Educators will now be able to create class teams based on the enrollment roster of their courses with appropriate user roles. Coming soon to Blackboard and Canvas, educators and students will be able to navigate to their respective class teams directly from their LMS courses using desktop, mobile, or web platforms.

When: August for Blackboard and Canvas

Access your Teams meetings from Canvas
Coming soon, educators and students will be able to access and edit Teams meetings for their courses directly from Canvas. You’ll be able to view past and upcoming meetings at a glance with on your agenda and schedule, edit, and join meetings from within your LMS course. Plus, you’ll get all the great capabilities available in Teams, including security and meeting settings that help you create a safe and focused classroom environment. Using these capabilities depends on per-user meeting policies set by your IT administrator and will be supported across desktop and web.

When: August for Canvas

7) Help keep students safe with more options and controls for chat, policies, and meetings in Teams

Supervised chat
Chat messaging can be a vital tool for one-on-one follow-up between educators and students or group collaboration between students, but many institutions have concerns about inappropriate use of chat once it’s made available to students. Supervised chat allows designated educators to initiate chats with students and blocks students from starting new chats unless an appropriate educator is present. When chat supervision is enabled, supervisors are not allowed to leave chats, and other participants are not allowed to remove them, ensuring that chats involving students are properly supervised. This means that students can engage in safe chat conversations, and that schools can enable chat at different levels for students, faculty, and staff. Learn more.

And if you’re an IT admin, you can learn more here about supervised chat, and don’t forget about the existing automated chat content monitoring solutions that are already available today.

When: Available now

Delete a Teams chat
Educators have unique insights and needs when it comes to keeping online classrooms engaging and safe for all students. That’s why soon, chat supervisors will have the ability to delete inappropriate or off-topic messages from students or others at their discretion.

When: August

Disable video for a student or the whole class
Disable video will allow a meeting organizer to disable the video of an individual or all attendees. As a meeting safety capability, disabling video can help educators manage unwanted class disruptions. Similar to hard mute, once an attendee has had their video disabled, they can’t override the organizer and turn their video back on.

When: May

Improvements to muting and unmuting students
During an online class, educators will now have more options when it comes to muting and unmuting participants in class. Now, you can disable the mic of an individual student at any time (instead of the entire class like before). And now you can unmute an attendee’s mic even if their hand isn’t raised (instead of the student needing to raise their hand first.) Learn more.

When: Available now

Education policy wizard improvements
IT Admins for educational institutions can now apply a set of tailored policies to create a safe learning environment for students, educators, and staff. The policy wizard enables you to quickly and easily apply the most relevant set of policies for students at a global (Org-wide default) level and also apply a custom policy set to groups of educators and staff tailored to their needs. Coming soon, whenever a new feature is added to Teams, the appropriate policy for education is added by default, so IT Admins can rest assured that the right policies are in place to keep their students safe and engaged.

When: July

Custom policy packages for Teams
If you’re looking for more flexibility and control than the Education policy wizard, custom policy packages are a great alternative. IT Admins can bundle together custom policies for their students, faculty, staff, and other users in their organization. After creating the custom package, admins assign the package to directly to users or a group. This helps simplify, streamline, and provide consistency when managing policies for users and groups. Learn more.

When : Available now

8) Make class recordings easier with Microsoft Stream

Microsoft Stream, built on SharePoint, is rolling out new features that provide greater accessibility and security for Teams meeting recordings.

Automatic transcripts and captions for video recordings
We’re bringing meeting transcripts, transcript editing capabilities, as well as the ability to upload captions or subtitles, to videos stored on OneDrive and SharePoint. In addition, there will be an option to automatically create transcripts in the background that would only be shown with the meeting recording, providing on-demand accessibility for these. These improvements will support students with access to comprehensive accessibility solutions, and will increase productivity for educators through time saved on transcription.

When: August

Blocked downloads
To provide greater control over how meeting recordings are accessed and shared, soon you’ll be able to use new “block download” functionality to Teams meeting recordings that are automatically saved to OneDrive and SharePoint.

When: August

Learn more about these changes and many more features already available to you today.

And for those that love lists, here’s a review of all the features we shared and when they’re coming:

1) Personalize learning for each and every student

• Reading Progress – end of August


• Career Coach – May


• Immersive Reader on Teams iOS and Android – July


• Math app for Teams for Education – available now

2) A little organizational improvement that will make a big difference in Teams

• Simplified navigation in your class team – August

3) Make Assignments more engaging and fun…and easier for you, too!

• Group assignments – end of August


• Add assignments to Office 365 calendar – May


• Apps in assignments – end of August


• Whiteboard assignments – end of August


• Assignment limit increase to 300 students – June


• Snap a photo and submit – May


• Send grade data automatically to your Student Information System – available now


• Create and edit a quiz directly from an assignment – May


• Share a OneNote Class Notebook page as a read-only resource – available now

4) Better understand student engagement and emotional well-being with Education Insights

• Education Insights – available now


• Reflect app helps you understand how students are feeling – available now


• New! Insights is on mobile with Spotlight cards – July


• Check engagement with OneNote Class Notebook – available now


• New Insights for educational leaders and supporting staff – July

5) Encourage class participation during synchronous learning for better hybrid and remote classes

• Multiple choice quizzes in Teams meetings – May


• Channel meeting support for Microsoft Forms Polls – August


• Digital whiteboarding in Teams meetings – August


• Dynamic view – May


• Presenter mode – May


• Breakout room updates (participant retention and room reassignment) – available now


• Present to Teams from PowerPoint – June


• One thousand person interactive meetings and webinars – May


• Better browser meeting experiences for online classes – end of August

6) Improve connection and collaboration with Microsoft, Teams, and your LMS together

• Access your class teams from your Canvas and Blackboard – August


• Access your Teams meetings from Canvas – August

7) Help keep students safe with more options and controls for chat, policies, and meetings in Teams

• Supervised chat – available now


• Delete a Teams chat – August


• Disable video for a student or the whole class – May


• Improvements to muting and unmuting students – available now


• Education policy wizard improvements – July


• Custom policy packages for Teams – available now

8) Make class recordings easier with Microsoft Stream

• Automatic transcripts and captions for video recordings – August


• Blocked downloads – August

We’re always looking to improve the education experience in Teams, and we can only do that with your support and awesome ideas. If there’ something you’d like to see in Teams for Education, please let us know! We are proud to be on this education journey with you and your students.

And in case you missed it:

1. Check out the latest news and updates for Microsoft Education.


2. Sign up for the free Microsoft Educator newsletter to get free professional development, time-saving tips, snackable resources, and more.


3. Get free training on how to use these and other Microsoft Education tools in your classroom (yes, it’s really free)!

Make Learning More Accessible, Secure, and Customized with Microsoft Stream

by Contributed | May 4, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Over the years, as students and educators have headed back to school, there’s been an ever-constant need for reliable tools that help foster learning and development. As a core enabler of remote and hybrid learning, video has become central to education in the last year, providing an authentic, engaging medium that best captures the in-class experience today.

Microsoft Stream (built on SharePoint) is bringing to production long-awaited features that unlock new value for you in the areas of accessibility, security, and customized content consumption.

   Accessibility

We’re complementing recent Teams meeting accessibility enhancements with improvements to transcripts and captions in Stream on SharePoint. This summer, we’ll show transcripts alongside any meeting recording that came with Teams Live Transcript.  Then we’ll add the ability to upload your own transcript to any other video stored on OneDrive and SharePoint, which is also used to drive captions and subtitles. After that, we’ll be adding the ability to generate a new transcript for a Teams meeting recording or any other video that has already been saved to OneDrive or SharePoint.  This provides on-demand accessibility even for meetings where live transcription was not available or used.

When:  July-September 2021

Security

When it comes to a video reaching its intended audience, there exist many key considerations – from privacy and intellectual property security to preventing unauthorized access to class content. We’ve heard from you how much of a priority this is. To address this, we’re making Teams meeting recordings read-only by default and will add “block download” functionality to Teams meeting recordings that are automatically saved to OneDrive and SharePoint. 

This feature provides greater control over how meeting recordings are accessed and shared and will roll out initially to non-channel Teams meeting recordings – with channel recordings following a few weeks later. 

When: July-August 2021

Content consumption

While video has many advantages over its alternatives, its discovery, distribution, and consumption can be challenging for educators and students alike. The Stream web app will soon be part of office.com – consolidating videos into a seamless, individualized experience for all stakeholders. We’ll also release a new player for video files in OneDrive and SharePoint, including several upgrades for playback such as higher quality video, a transcript pane on the right, speaker identification in the transcript (if enabled), and support for switching between transcripts in multiple languages.

When: June-August 2021

Other features

Most of the features mentioned above are arriving by August, but you can use Stream on SharePoint today. All your videos on OneDrive and SharePoint, whether they are Teams meeting recordings or video files you’ve uploaded, are Stream videos, and we’ll continue working to deliver the high-quality playback, features, and scale you expect.

Learn more about existing and new features in Microsoft Stream (on SharePoint).

30 new features in Minecraft, Forms, Whiteboard, and more to get excited about now through August

by Contributed | May 4, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day to you!

And—we have to say it—May the fourth be with you.

So much has happened the last year, much of it from our own homes or empty-to-partially-empty classrooms, and it hasn’t been easy (to say the least). But thanks to you—your perseverance, persistence, and above-and-beyond-ness to help students—you’ve inspired 30 new features and capabilities across Microsoft Education (including a whole bunch in Microsoft Teams).

No matter what the next year looks like, we’re excited to share new features and updates to help you and your students. Just click on the quick links below to navigate to a section:

1. Personalize learning for each and every student


2. Give students new tools to explore and solve Math on their own


3. Do more with Forms


4. Minecraft: Education Edition now available for clubs, camps, homeschools, and more!


5. Improve connection and collaboration with Microsoft and your LMS together


6. Keep students engaged with Microsoft Whiteboard


7. Create more with updates to OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word


8. Make learning more accessible, secure, and customized with video in Microsoft Stream

Let’s dive in! (Click here to jump right into the full list, without extra descriptions)

Azure Backup Center – Your one-stop for all things backups.

by Contributed | May 4, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Hello Folks,

We live in a world where the only constant is change.  Actually… There might be one thing that has not changed for IT pros and operation folks…  The need for an appropriate backup strategy.  Today, in this world of fast innovation and ever faster iteration we need to be flexible and nimble when it comes to protecting assets and data for accidental or malicious events.

We are now facing a series of challenges:

• Exponential data growth


• Data sources sprawl.


• Maintaining ever growing databases.


• Keeping everything in compliance with current regulations.

Thankfully, the new Azure Backup Center can help us all address these issues. Let’s dive into how Backup Center can provides a single unified management experience in Azure for enterprises to govern, monitor, operate, and analyze backups at scale.

Exponential data growth

With the advent of AI, Mobile, IoT….  We are capturing data at a rate greater than ever before. There was a time when data consisted mostly of documents, spreadsheets, pictures, and media content. And the amount of them was minimal. All these types still exist, but they have grown in numbers and size with the advent of tools to easily create such content.  For example, files which previously required a few kilobytes of storage now need several megabytes of storage. See example below where a 3-minute video recorded at the “standard” resolution at the time as grown in size from approx. 5MB to 260MB (52 times bigger)

You can try to keep up with the capacity requirements on your own or you can leverage the scalable nature of Azure Backup and never have to worry about running out of room to perform your backups.

Data sources sprawl

It’s also become extremely complex to analyse, consume, interpret, store all this data, without exposing your organization to risk. After all, it would only take a malformed query to compromise a data repository, or a fat finger to permanently wipe-out a storage account.  The architects, administrators and operators need to figure out ways to proactively scan, discover and backup workloads in their environment.

Azure Backup Center (ABC) is a great resource to help you get a grip on this.  The discoverability potential it unlocks for you is significant. With ABC “Protectable datasources” menu item you can view the datasources in your environment, that haven’t been configured for backup. And act on them quickly.

You can filter the list by datasource subscription, resource group, location, type and tags.  Therefore, you don’t need to hop around the portal to see if all the resources across all your enterprise’s subscriptions are protected.

Currently, the support matrix for ABC’s Protectable datasources pane only exposes the following workloads, but more are on the roadmap.

• Azure Virtual Machine


• Azure Database for PostgreSQL server


• SQL in Azure VM


• SAP HANA in Azure VM


• Azure Files


• Azure Blobs


• Azure Managed Disks

Once you’ve identified a data source that needs to be backed up, you can address it quickly and configure backup for the resource without having to navigate to the Recovery Services vault.

Compliance, Regulations and Good Governance

We’ve all heard of recent scandals and data privacy breaches, because of those, there is increased scrutiny and demand for oversight on your data. Furthermore, the requirements dictated by laws and regulations present a set of challenges to your organisation.  ABC provides us with a single location to define and assign and track Azure policies for backup across all your supported resources in Azure.

These capabilities allow you to ensure that everything is covered and report on your recoverability to auditors and management in an easy to navigate ABC interface.

There you have it.  We took services that you need (backup, Policies, inventory…) and organized them in a way that makes it straightforward for you to protect your environment without having to worry about building your own infrastructure.

• Learn more and get started with Backup center.


• Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones in the Azure Backup feedback forum.

Cheers!