Microsoft Teams is the communication tool of choice for many school districts. I asked my tween what tips I could give teachers to make the lessons run smoother and here is what he gave me.
Make Teams Fun
Building a rapport is very difficult to do through a camera lens or through written text. Microsoft Teams offers a video streaming function, but how do you make it fun? You could try spicing up your video background by downloading and customizing the background video image!
Here are some neat backgrounds I have found:
Room For Zoom (this website that has a mixture of interesting backgrounds)
To get the background inside the Teams options, right click and copy the saved image file. This is normally in the Downloads folder.
Press the windows key and the 'r' key and type in the following and hit enter:
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Teams\Backgrounds
Paste the downloaded custom image into the folder and fire up a meeting to test it out!
Websites like Pinterest can be a gold mine of interesting backgrounds to try. Make sure to aim for the image size as close to 1920 x 1080 to avoid it from stretching and looking odd.
Muting and Minimizing Distractions in Video Conference
Kids can take advantage. It can be fun for them to mute the teacher and kick other students out of the meeting. The key to controlling this is the presenter role in the meeting.
1. Set up the meeting invite with you and only you as the presenter.
2. If inadvertently you started a meeting where you set everyone as presenter, set all the other participants an attendee only
Microsoft also gives a printable guide that clearly sets out how to craft a meeting successfully to ensure everyone has the right role.
Use Live Caption
This is a feature of teams, yet many don't use it and it can be useful to some students who learn by written word rather than auditory or visually. The option to turn this on as an option lies with the school system IT administrators. Here is a good look of what it looks like and the options the IT admin will need to adjust to give you the option to turn on subtitles.
Conference Connection Problems
There is a reason why Teams video chat was spotty in March 2020 and the following months was because the Microsoft servers were fairly overloaded. Hopefully those capacity issues have been addressed, but if your connection in Teams seems spotty, you can do quite a few different things to substitute:
Have everyone turn off video
Pre-record the video for later playback
Upload the pre-recorded video to a stream
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