Education has changed more rapidly in the past couple of years than at any other point in recent history. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of new technologies, with remote and hybrid learning increasingly becoming the norm. Microsoft Teams has played a critical role as education has moved online, centralizing learning, integrating seamlessly with schools' LMS, and facilitating collaboration.
While the communication platform has a suite of educational tools that support educators in the classroom, many apps and add-ons are available to extend its functionality. An all-in-one solution like Beedle can help streamline educators' workflows, enabling them to get the most out of Teams.
Whether their students attend in-person classes or complete most of their studies online, teachers can harness technology to design creative learning environments that engage students and enhance learning outcomes. Read on for six technology ideas for schools using Teams.
1. Beedle Class List
Teachers everywhere know that a well-organized class is one that's likely to go smoothly. However, keeping up with details about students across classes is often challenging and time consuming. That's where the Beedle Class List comes in, making it easy to organize and manage courses within Microsoft Teams.
Teachers can add the Beedle Class List to any channel within Teams. The add-on gives them an overview of everyone in a class and enables them to divide classes into random groups to facilitate teamwork and group discussions.
2. Beedle Journal
From grading papers to tracking classroom participation, keeping up with a student's performance often takes a significant amount of time. The Beedle Journal is an interactive tool that helps teachers monitor students' progress by giving them a place to record quick notes about students, which they can share with other teachers or the students themselves.
It also facilitates collaboration between teachers with the same students, enabling them to track progress and address areas where students struggle. The Beedle Journal also provides a record of a student's performance over time, which teachers can use for future reference to compare past and present performance and track improvements.
Equally important, educators can share journal entries with students who've missed a class to let them know what was covered during their absence.
3. Beedle Planning
Well-planned classes guide teachers, giving them a roadmap of what needs to be covered to meet the learning objectives. Beedle Planning enables teachers to organize and plan lessons using Microsoft Teams.
Teachers can use Beedle Planning to help increase student engagement by linking lesson plans and learning resources to the Beedle Calendar and giving them daily, monthly, or weekly access to the information. Accordingly, students always know what's expected of them.
Beedle Planning also saves time by giving teachers an overview of all stored documents, so they don't have to search for them when it's time to begin a lesson. It helps teachers streamline work by letting them copy lesson plans and documents across Teams to reuse later or share with students or colleagues. Beedle Planning has an intelligent search function too, so it’s easy for students and teachers to find documents quickly.
4. Beedle Assessment
When educators think of technology ideas for schools, simplifying the process of assessing students is one thing that often comes to mind. After all, assessment is a critical component of education, enabling instructors to determine whether their teaching methods are working and to link student performance to learning objectives.
However, assessing students can be challenging and requires keeping track of multiple moving parts. Microsoft Teams offers a solution to this problem with the interactive tool Beedle Assessment, which enables teachers to track student performance against the Beedle Class List.
Teachers can track how a student performs throughout the school year and download all the information that they've stored in Beedle Assessment to an Excel file to share outside the app.
5. Beedle Parent
Ensuring that parents and guardians are engaged in their children's learning can help enhance academic performance and positively influence behavior. The Beedle Parent App facilitates communication between parents, guardians, and teachers, involving them in all steps of the learning process.
With this app, parents don't have to wait for parent-teacher conferences to learn the details of their child's performance. Instead, they can monitor their child's progress daily, including accessing assignments, attendance records, journal comments, news and announcements, and key deadlines and events using the app.
6. Beedle Objectives
Learning objectives are an essential part of education, explaining what students should be able to do based on classroom instruction and helping teachers plan effective classes, activities, and assessments.
Beedle Objectives was created with this in mind. Educators can use this tool to share learning goals, curriculum statements, and success criteria with colleagues. They can also add objectives to Beedle Planning and Beedle Assessment, making it easy to track whether students have learned the required material.
Final Thoughts
Given the importance of Microsoft Teams in classrooms across the globe, it's not surprising that the communications platform is one of the first things mentioned when discussing technology ideas for schools.
While Teams is a powerful tool on its own, add-ons like Beedle enable educators to extend its capabilities and tailor it to their unique needs. From streamlining workflows to maximizing learning outcomes, Beedle can serve as an essential tool in any educator's arsenal.
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!
