Technology that helps teams work smarter and with greater flexibility may become one of the most significant lasting positive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employers had to close their doors and send employees home, relying on them to improvise interactions through teleconferencing and other technological solutions to keep business and daily life functioning as normally as possible. According to a survey from McKinsey & Co., executives now report that they are increasing investments in digital remote work technology more than any other initiative. Heading into 2022, an estimated 60% of employees were working remotely.
Schools have an opportunity to extend this migration to remote learning and education administration by leveraging existing investments in Microsoft’s Office 365 environment. According to the World Bank, “the use of information and communication technologies in education can play a crucial role in providing new and innovative forms of support to teachers, students, and the learning process more broadly.”
Microsoft Teams for Education has features and functions that enable teachers and schools to improve their performance by creating a unified approach to planning and communication for interacting with each other and with parents and students.
With two decades of experience in the technology sector, the team at Beedle understands the advantages of Microsoft Teams for Education and how it helps educators. They have developed a system that extends these benefits even further, through integration with Beedle. Here are three of the main advantages.
Educational success depends heavily on family involvement and support. But without the ability to enable parents and caregivers to engage with teachers and students on a common platform, technology can only go so far in supporting family communication.
The ubiquity of Microsoft Teams, extended by Beedle, means there are excellent opportunities to build better relationships between the classroom, school, and home.
One advantage of Microsoft Teams for Education is opening lines of communication so parents can monitor student progress, ask questions, and receive alerts about any challenges that their child might be facing.
Beedle is an add-on for Microsoft for Teams and simplifies things for parents by providing a single login in a single app that is accessible from anywhere and at any time, so they can stay informed. The capabilities of Beedle are available immediately. Teachers can send messages to students and parents, and parents can monitor assignments and work with their children on particular challenges.
Since Microsoft has many easily accessible and widely used applications, the chances are good that parents will find themselves in a familiar and comfortable computing environment. It means less of a learning curve when utilizing Microsoft Teams and Beedle for insights into student progress.
Another of the significant advantages of Microsoft Teams for Education is the ability to streamline your day so you can focus on the students who most need your help.
Like parents, teachers can access technology resources easily and quickly through a single sign-on, navigating the Microsoft environment to find what they need and complete tasks.
Beedle takes that simplification process even further by automating and unifying repetitive tasks that can take up valuable education time. Since educators can reach parents easily through the Beedle Parent app, they no longer have to set aside time to write separate emails to families outlining specific issues about a student or synchronize schedules to make a call home.
The Beedle/Teams setup provides powerful tools for planning lessons and creating calendars that can easily replicate across classes and school years. With this powerful combination, users can also access a single system rather than separate systems for each task. With a single sign-on, teachers can get everything done at once. Parents have it even easier because they don’t have to get or install Teams. They can simply access Microsoft Teams with the Beedle add-on through the natively responsive app.
The advantages of Microsoft Teams for Education extend from individual classrooms to the school and district. Teams enables districts and municipalities to streamline separate workflows into a single platform, including critical educational tasks such as lesson planning, attendance, and student assessment.
A single technology platform reduces the time required to train teachers on separate applications. It also simplifies installation, given that the system can be up and running within minutes. Teams is an online application that’s accessible through computers, tablets, mobile phones, and other devices.
An effective Beedle/Teams setup translates to lower maintenance and implementation costs, reducing multiple enterprise licensing fees. It also simplifies cybersecurity because school personnel only have to learn and monitor one set of security protocols. The cybersecurity architecture builds on your district’s existing Office365 setup. More specifically, your district’s data will be protected by Microsoft cyber-defense operations, as it is hosted and run in Microsoft Azure.
Other maintenance, management, and implementation tasks are also standardized, reducing the need for redundant spending on IT.
Beedle's executives and managers include teachers, developers, technical experts, and business specialists, all unified by a passion for bringing efficiencies to education through technology.
The Beedle team has pioneered advances in education technology since 1999 that help educators plan, communicate, collaborate, create content, and share resources. Maximize your resources, and enrich the educational experience in a single platform: Beedle and Microsoft Teams.
Beedle is an all-in-one solution for teaching and learning in Microsoft Teams, giving schools the power to leverage Teams for improved resource and lesson planning, class management, insight organization, and more!
If you’re in a Teams district or school and want to unlock the true potential of Microsoft Teams, contact our specialists to maximize the worth of your Microsoft Teams investment today!
