Hi everybody!
As we continue to roll out new features and upgrades for our Teams for Education community, we’re excited to share some of the latest and greatest updates that will help make the connection between educators and families stronger and easier. As always, we’d love to hear from you on your comments and feedback and hope to see everyone who’s able to make it to ISTE later this month.
As part of this new update release, Microsoft will be offering a suite of three products to strengthen the connection between educators and families, keep families engaged and updated on their students’ learning, and bring parent communities together.
1. Parent Connection – Connecting educators and families – Available now
Parents & guardians, students, and educators all want the same thing – for every student to reach their full potential. Educators carry a heavy portion of this responsibility, but they can’t do it alone. To help provide the tools needed to fulfill this goal, we’ve launched Parent Connection to help educators more effectively involve the parents & guardians of the class to productively support their students’ achievement.
With Parent Connection, educators can see the roster of the parents & guardians in their class and initiate a Teams chat, phone call or email with them with a single click. So now, instead of the twice-yearly parent-teacher conference or sporadic email, educators and guardians can provide more iterative updates back and forth to help manage & track their student’s progress.
And since the interaction happens over Teams, educators can communicate with parents & guardians while keeping their personal contact information private.
Parent Connection is generally available to all Teams for Education customers (included in all Office365 A-SKUS). Learn more here or talk with your IT administrator about setting up Parent Connection using School Data Sync.
2. School Connection keeps parents/guardians engaged and updated – Private Preview BTS ‘22
School Connection, a NEW parent/guardian-facing application, will be available for private preview in August 2022. It keeps parents and guardians up to date on their students’ Teams assignments, classroom engagement, learning progress, time management, and provides a teacher directory. If you are interested in participating in a private preview of the application with the parents of a single class or a larger group, please submit your expression of interest here.
By surfacing critical details on assignment turn-in status, teacher feedback, grades, classroom engagement activity, reading progress and assignment completion rates, parents and guardians are empowered with relevant, timely information about their students’ learning. A teacher directory by class/subject that makes communicating with your students’ classes easy.
3. Teams Communities brings parent communities together – Private Preview Program BTS ‘22
In addition to parents being able to respond to teacher’s messages and not miss out on information, we would like to introduce the brand NEW – Teams Communities – a safe and trusted place for Education communities to share information, connect with one another and get things done! We have a limited opportunity for twenty (20) Education leaders, Schools, or PTAs to sign up and try out Teams Communities. To join in this exciting opportunity, please sign up here.