Here are a selection of short videos from Microsoft showing some initial steps for getting Teams going for use in your class
From any of those links, there are lots of further links to explore the features of Teams.
Teams is not designed to replace Moodle. Moodle and Teams can compliment one another. Moodle is an open-sourced, community-supported product that has decades of experience in traditional Learning Management System functions like receiving Assignments, distributing Files, and organizing a course. Though Microsoft has attempted to introduce some of those functions to Teams, we recommend focusing Teams use on their modern Chat interface, the videoconferencing functions, and other collaboration tools.
Visit https://moodle.kzoo.edu/login/index.php to access the login page. Enter your K ID and password. Once you are logged in, you can look at the Course Overview block on the Dashboard. Fall 2020 sites will be listed under “Future” until September 14th. At that time, they will also appear in My Courses on the menu on the left.
Consider starting the the Four Models for Your Moodle Post on the Teaching Commons. What do you need your Moodle site to do? Do you need weekly sections or should you delete them? To learn how to use the site, you can watch a video introduction on Stream. If you’re inclined to read, there is also a Moodle 101 page with instructions. Would you like to talk to a human being? Contact Josh Moon, Educational Technology Specialist.
The simplest solution is to make sure you have set your Course Visibility to “Show” and then copy the Moodle course’s URL into an email to students (example: https://moodle.kzoo.edu/course/view.php?id=2638). Alternately, you can direct students to navigate to the appropriate departmental category under the active quarter Course Sites. In either case, they will need to login and click the “enroll me” button for the course.
Moodle does allow “Enrollment keys,” which are essentially passwords to protect course access. If one is especially concerned, you can prevent students from self-enrolling and manually add students from your course roster. For the latter option, click “Participants” in the menu then select “Enrollment Methods” in the gear wheel icon. By clicking the eye icon, you can disable Self Enrollment for students. You will then have to return to Enroll Users and manually search for students.
On your course’s main page, click the gear wheel in the upper right and select “Edit settings.” In the Settings option for Course Visibility, change the setting to “Show.”
While you can use the File resource to manually add files with more control over settings, you can also turn your Editing On then drag-and-drop files from a folder on your computer. You can also go back and adjust settings to files already on Moodle.
If you’re using the Assignment activity, you can choose multiple options for giving feedback. The most common are to enable Feedback Comments to give the grader a text window to add comments and Feedback Files which allows the grader to upload a file of their own for grading. Rubrics, a PDF editor, and other options exist. Note: this is not what the small “Comments…” (below) field is for.
Hosting large video files directly on Moodle causes problems for the system and are difficult to access for users. Fortunately, there are other options to get your video content on Moodle. If you need to host your video somewhere, you can upload it to Microsoft Stream or your own hosting solution. Moodle will allow you to link or embed these hosted files.
In this video blog I share my thoughts on how I’ll use digital whiteboarding in my class this fall. I teach organic chemistry, a discipline that is rooted in drawing chemical structures — lots of pictures! To help students understand this discipline, its helpful to do this work together. I plan to run my class in a semi-synchronous fashion, interacting with students in real time using Google Jamboard.
I think incoming First Year Students will need more structure, so their asynchronous work will have deadlines Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This daily work will be a combination of readings, my videos, and their written responses. Bigger papers will be continue over several days or weeks.
Synchronous activities: On Monday and Wednesday, I will meet with half the class for discussion and activities. On Friday, I will meet virtually with the entire class on Teams, using break-out channels for small group discussion.
I taught this class in the Spring, so the online backbone is already in place. This is a combination of my videos, readings, responses to the videos and readings, quizzes, industry research, and some optional materials. This part is all asynchronous. These will be opened Monday morning and due Sunday night.
The new part will be the synchronous, on-campus elements. For this I plan to divide my class into 6 groups of roughly 5 students each. On Monday, I will meet with groups A&B; on Wednesday groups C&D; and Friday groups E&F. The in-person activities will be a combination of problem-solving, short cases, discussion, and quizzes based on the previous week’s material. For me, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday will be a repeat, but with different students, since I’ll use the same activities.
On class days, groups who don’t meet with me will meet remotely with their smaller group to discuss and post responses to discussion questions.
At the #KTeachDev2020 Live Session on July 22, I awkwardly tried to work around a little annoyance in Teams: when screensharing a PowerPoint window in a live call, Teams won’t let me see the chat or the list of participants. When using Teams to record lectures that isn’t a problem, but it is a deal breaker for live meetings because I need to see the chat and the list of participants to monitor the group for questions and raised hands.
Turns out there is a feature of Teams to address that problem: There’s a built-in PowerPoint presentation utility in Teams.
Once the meeting is running, select share screen and notice there is a place to select a PowerPoint file.
For me that doesn’t show anything right away, but when I select browse it gives me the opportunity to select my PowerPoint file “Upload from my computer”
Once I’ve done that, my PowerPoint slides show up in the big window where video images usually appear, and all the other features of Teams (the menu ribbon at the bottom, chat and participants windows, etc ) are there waiting for me to use, as you see in the image below.
Here’s an external video from a great source with more details.
Enrollment: 16
Typically, this class is discussion-based. Students engage in a lot of group work, write in some form almost daily, and discuss or present course material constantly. Writing is emphasized, and I use time to focus in on practicing skills they can use going forward (i.e., marking a text, close reading, developing a topic sentence, organizing paragraphs, peer review). Much of this work requires students to be next to each other—and since this won’t be possible, we will do a lot of remote work, because I think the peer-to-peer work is critical.
The graph below illustrates my current, tentative plan. Yellow is constant: what undergirds the work and what the scaffolded work is building toward—in that sense, both asynchronous and synchronous. Green represents weekly asynchronous tasks, blue synchronous.
Enrollment: 4
This is the last course in the 1st year language sequence. Traditionally, we have met four times per week. For the fall, I am planning mostly an online course format, with optional in-person meetings:
Some notes:
Asynchronous
Synchronous
Asynchronous
Synchronous
Asynchronous
Synchronous
Asynchronous
Synchronous
For me, these have to be adding some value to be worth it—I still want any time physically spent together to be as safe as possible…and something that we can do while wearing masks (not ideal for second language production). I’m crafting exercises that we can do outdoors to practice key grammatical concepts (e.g., comparative and superlatives adjectives will involve a scavenger hunt, “find the tallest tree on the quad.”). I think a lot of these will probably involve games we can do at a distance, or scavenger hunts or the like. In addition to allowing us to (comparatively) safely be together as a class, I think they will break up the monotony of the weekly routine. Students working remotely could, however, do the tasks from home.
Enrollment: 25 (Spring 2020, 31)
As the intermediate microeconomics course is a core course for both majors, students in the course are either economic majors or business majors. The course is characterized by a heavy reliance on calculus. The assignments are mainly problem-based. In the past, due to its emphasis on mathematics, students have found the course challenging. The challenging nature of the course makes it important that students have opportunities to (1) constantly go from simple to complex problem-solving activities and (2) work together in teams, with me as their guide.
The plan is to move all content delivery online, this is the online backbone of the course. Course material has three distinct components: (1) textbook readings, (2) online learning platform provided by publisher, and (3) instructional videos created by me. There will be a scheduled virtual office hour each week (Fridays before all assignments are due).
Weekly assessment activities:
Activities 1, 2, and 3 are completed online and due before Team meetings. Activity 5 is completed online and due Friday. Activity 4 is completed either F2F or during synchronous Teams meeting. If forced to move to an online only model, then all students will meet with me once a week over a synchronous Teams meeting. Depending on assigned classroom space and student preferences, I might have to rotate students between F2F meetings and synchronous Teams meetings.
Saturday/Sunday
Monday
No class meeting, students are expected to work on online learning platform activities and watch instructional videos (take quizzes). I will send students an announcement (text/video) that outlines the week’s activities and responsibilities.
Wednesday
Meet Team A (no more than 10 students)
Thursday
Meet Team B online using Microsoft Teams
Friday
Meet Team C (no more than 10 students)
Too long, didn’t read: In this post, we reflect on some of the course design choices we made for our large, Psychology research methods course. A lot of things we’ll keep, some we’ll change. Knowing we couldn’t simply teach the course the same as previous iterations, we used these guiding principles and focused on 1) how to make the class accessible and inclusive to all students, 2) embracing flexibility, 3) following up with students quickly, and 4) extending compassion to ourselves and the students.
Some elements seemed to work really well, and were mentioned by students as particularly helpful while learning in a global pandemic.
Now, having time to pause and reflect, in some ways we are grateful for the opportunity to drastically rearrange our teaching priorities. We realize that many of the “necessary” components of past course iterations were in fact quite superfluous. By leading with compassion and reframing our approach, the students seem to have learned more, made more real-world connections, and achieved more psychological balance. Come to think of it…so did we.
