One year ago, Microsoft officially launched Microsoft Teams in Office 365 for Education. To mark the anniversary, Microsoft has recapped some of the positive feedback it's seen since launch, while also introducing a new batch of much-requested features for teachers and students alike.
One of the biggest new features making its debut is rubric grading in Teams. Rubric grading will let you create, store, and apply rubrics to assignments from within Teams, Microsoft says. This saves teachers times by being able to apply grading tools to multiple assignments at a time, and students will now be able to more easily keep an eye on how their assignments will be assessed.
As Microsoft notes, this feature is one of the first features to result from Microsoft's teaming up with Chalkup earlier this year.
Teams is also making it easier for teachers to send a quiz or survey to students using Microsoft Forms. Educators will soon have the ability to add Forms to new assignments, which they can then have students fill out and return. Forms will then be able to auto-grade, along with provide feedback and scores in the Assignments grade book.
Some other, smaller features are on the way as well. On OneNote assignments, teachers can set pages to automatically lock to "read only" for students after a due date passes. Teachers will also now be able to easily mute all students in the conversation tab when necessary. Meanwhile, Teams will now support creating a simple code to distribute to class members or staff to easily join your team.
Finally, teachers will be able to reuse an existing team as a template when creating new teams, and you'll now be able to archive teams in read-only mode when you're finished with a particular class.
As for availability, muting all students and the abilityto reuse a team as a template are available now worldwide. Rubrics grading, Forms in Assignments, and the rest of the features announced today are expected to roll out worldwide "in the coming weeks."
These new features also come as Microsoft is seeing an uptick in certain education segments in the U.S. According to the latest quarterly report from Futuresource{.nofollow}, Windows' share of the market for devices under $300 grew by 3.3 percentage points year-over-year. Chromebooks were down by 17.9 percent in the same segment, but Chrome OS still holds a majority share of the market. That said, Futuresource notes that Google's growth has slowed, while Microsoft's appears to be increasing in terms of shipments.
