I have updated my Did you know guide to include more tips and suggestions including more in relation to Microsoft Teams which continues to be my favourite tool during this period of Remote Learning.
You can access the updated Did You Know guide here.
Up until recently I have been scheduling my Teams meetings via the Calendar option in Teams however I came across the ability to do this from Outlook or from Outlooks web equivalent which therefore allows you to use any personal email contact groups which I have created. This makes it much easier to setup meetings with groups of people where a distribution list doesn’t exist and where adding the users individually to the meetings invitee list would be time consuming.
On Outlook assuming you have teams installed the Teams Meeting option should appear automatically in the ribbon when you are viewing you are viewing you calendar:
If it doesn’t you should be able to add it by customising your ribbon, plus if you want it to appear on your home page, when viewing your email, you can also do this.
In Web Outlook (e.g. via http://www.office.com) it is simply a case of going to your calendar and clicking where you want your meeting to occur. Once the meeting details window appears click More Options in the bottom right of the window.
Now in the resulting window select the Add Online meeting option to the right of the Location section. Here you can select Teams Meeting.
You have now created a Teams meeting which, once saved, all those invited will get an email invite for. The only limitation I can see currently is I cant see a way to add the meeting to a channel if you need to do this.
For me this saves time as you can easily create personal email contact groups for those groups of people you frequently have meetings with then use this when you create the meeting so no longer need to type in the user names of each individual user.
Last nights Microsoft TweetMeet focussed on Remote Learning. It was certainly a busy session with my tweetdeck updating faster than I could think; it was a blur of activity. Overall it was an excellent session and probably the best TweetMeet I have been involved in so far. I therefore thought it might be useful to summarise the key messages I took away from the event:
I think this is very important; to recognise that we, teachers, our students, their parents/guardians and the wider school community are all human. This is a difficult time; unlike anything we have experienced before and for many the unfamiliar circumstances we find ourselves in can be very scary. Add to that concerns relating to the health and wellbeing of loved ones, of family and of friends plus for some the actual loss of people close to them and we find ourselves significantly outside our comfort zones. We need to recognise and accept this, and to ensure we consider it when interacting with others. We need to ensure we provide space and time for these concerns to be shared and discussed and we need to support each other. High expectations are great but may need to be considered carefully in the current context we find ourselves in. As we seek to use remote learning to continue children’s education we must maintain our focus that the most important thing in times like this isn’t the curriculum, assessment, EdTech, etc, but is in fact our teachers, students, their parents, families, and the wider school community; What matters most is people.
Related to the above is the fact that as humans we are social animals. We are designed to be at our best when working with others and in this time of isolation this is no different. For me the TweeetMeet was a perfect example of this. There were lots of people involved in the session each individually doing excellent things in relation to remote Learning but by coming together and sharing, discussing and exploring things together we are all the better. At this time of isolation we need to ensure we build the opportunities to collaborate and to share experiences. Where individually we identify things that work or don’t work, we should seek to share this. It may be that ideas shared by others won’t work in your particular context, but by at least considering such ideas you will have gained some insight; Think Edison and 1000 lightbulbs. The more we share the better. My favourite phrase in relation to this being “the smartest person in the room is the room”. And thankfully we live in a time where we largely have the technology available to achieve this through blogs, vlogs, podcasts, video conferencing, webinars, etc. The world is a pretty big room!
For all the discussion about whether EdTech makes a difference or not, whether we should embrace technology in schools or ban it, we often miss an important fact. Technology is here, and it is here to stay. Social media, on-demand TV, sat nav, video conferencing, artificial intelligence, user tracking and many other technologies all exist now and they aren’t going to disappear, in fact they are likely only to continue to evolve and to take an ever greater place in our lives. Given this world how can education avoid technology; I don’t believe it can. Technology provides us many tools which can allow us to do new and exciting things and we need to seek to use it. Just think where we would be in this current crisis without technology. How would learning work without it? So, if technology can act as an enabler of learning in a sudden crisis like the one we find ourselves in now imagine what we might be able to achieve with a bit of time, planning and people working together. This is what we need to consider in relation to life beyond Covid19.
I have written about this already and you can read my post here. Our biggest challenge is likely to be the lack of parity which exists in relation to technology. It isn’t just about access to devices such as laptops or tablets for use by students at home, or access to the internet at home. We also need to consider the many other divides. Parents at home may have differing abilities to support their children in using technology at home plus students themselves will have differing abilities. Schools will have different amounts of IT support available to help out staff, students and parents with issues and problems. Additionally, schools will have different amounts of professional learning and training resources again for use by staff, students and parents. There will be different levels of IT equipment in schools with some schools having 1:1 devices while others might be limited to a single IT lab or less. Experience with the pedagogical aspects of using technology to support learning will also differ across schools or even within schools across departments. Confidence levels and motivation to experiment, plus the school culture with regards technology is another factor which is inconsistent. If we are to achieve equal opportunities for all students in relation to the opportunities to use technology in learning, these and many other divides will need to be considered.
The final point that stuck out for me from the TweetMeet related to safeguarding and the need to keep students and staff safe during this period of remote learning. This is an issue which in my view is very complex and is for individual schools to reach a decision in relation to their own context. That said I have a particular view on this and in particular on the use of video to allow students and teachers to interact. I am aware some schools have disabled the ability for video calls to be used citing safeguarding concerns, with the view that by turning off video within the schools technology solution they are protecting their students. If we accept that we are human and we are social animals, then students will seek personal contact independent of our actions, so by disabling video we force students to use other non-school platforms to achieve the personal contact they seek. I believe this represents a risk. I also think we need to consider the fact that learning is a social experience so the more social we make remote learning the more successful the learning will be. Removing the use of video complete with the various visual cues it presents reduces the impact of learning. I will acknowledge that there is a clear safeguarding risk where video is enabled, however life is never without risk. For me, it is about engaging parents, students and staff about managing the risk as much as is reasonably possible while still enabling the best learning opportunities possible.
When I started writing this piece my plan was a short summary of the TweetMeet session; Failed on that one as this isn’t exactly short. I also must admit this post also only covers the highlights of the session as I saw it and most likely missed loads of other excellent points or discussion threads. That said, and in acknowledging point 2, I thought I would share. I hope the above is helpful and look forward to reading any thoughts or comments people may have.
As we head towards the end of the Easter break and into the new term and for a lot of schools, a period of remote learning, I thought I would share my thoughts and tips on remote learning.
The first point I would make is that there is no one solution to remote learning. It depends on your context including the age of your students, previous experience using technology and online learning platforms, individual subject requirements, teachers confidence with platforms and their own personal experience of those that are available and the equipment available to teachers and students, to name just a few factors.
The five points above are the key suggestions I would make in relation to remote learning. You will notice they are inter-related in a number of ways. They are purposely not over specific, as given the different contexts of teachers across a single school never mind across the globe, I don’t believe it is possible to be specific and precise without either ruling out some learning opportunities that would work or proposing approaches which in some contexts may detract or damage learning.
To all engaging in remote learning, good luck, and please do share your thoughts, successes and what hasnt worked as together we can get through this, and together we can learn a lot from this experience which may help us start to reshape the educational experiences of the students yet to grace our classrooms.
The digital divide has long concerned educators in considering those students who have access to the internet and devices at home, plus support from parents in relation to device use, and those who do not. Covid-19 has had me thinking about this, what this now means for schools and students and how we might leap the divide which exists.
Divides
The digital divide as a concept seems quite simple and tangible; either they have access, or they don’t. This disguises the complexity of the issue and in my mind the existence of divides, plural, rather than a singular divide.
Firstly internet access; Some households will have super-fast broadband while others may have nothing whatsoever with a multitude of options in between. The issue being this isn’t necessarily an issue of parents choosing not to have access but could relate to the location of their home and the available options in relation to internet connectivity.
Devices; Some families may have a computer/tablet at home while others may not. Where a computer does exist, it may be a shared device or even a device used by parents to enable working from home. Where a shared device this represents a challenge for a child to gain access especially where other children or even adults need the device while a child is seeking to undertake time bounded work. This device also may or may not have some of the software used within school. It may not have an up to date operating system and may therefore represent a cyber risk to users using it.
Mobile Phones: I mention mobile phones separately to devices above given how common mobile phone ownership is among students these days but even this assumption hides a layer of complexity. Some students may not have phones, albeit a small number these days, however those that do have phones may have limited data packages meaning use for schoolwork could quickly become costly to families where Wi-Fi at home is not available. The size of screens may make phones less ideal for work set or, like devices, phones may not have the needed software. I note that many schools are deploying homework or school management apps currently and therefore I believe most schools are already taking a stance that parents will have a mobile phone; In the most cases this is true but I do wonder about what is in place for those where it isn’t true.
Support: In schools the availability of IT support is critical. If staff, as users, have difficulties, they may quickly disengage and re-engaging them with technology is often much more difficult once this has happened. In schools this is easy enough, although as I will explain later even this is an oversimplification, but at home this is dependent on parents. Parents need to support the specific usage of a tech tool as set by the teacher as well as providing the required technical support. Some parents are likely to be very tech savvy and quickly able and willing to support their children in engaging with technology and learning through digital tools. Equally though there will be many parents who themselves will feel out of their depth and unable to support their children in using what technology they have access to at home.
Schools: And even in our schools there are divides. There are divides in terms of the equipment available with schools, with some school issuing devices to all teaching staff whereas in others there is little available beyond a classroom computer fixed in each classroom. The available internet bandwidth may differ between schools as may the availability of IT support and training. Also, the overall school attitude to IT and to IT strategy may differ with some schools engaged in experimenting and innovating and other schools scared to explore, scared of risks around GDPR, etc, or where EdTech may even have been given only passing consideration.
Moving Forward
The above divides can easily be seen as providing an impossible and wicked problem; How do we address all these different issues? In my view when presented with a problem like this our best option is to seek to make progress and avoid overthinking or spending too much time in planning. It is simply a case of act, review, adjust, act again, and a continuing process of iteration. But where to focus?
I would propose three key areas first:
Infrastructure: One of the biggest limiting factors continues to be access to fast reliable internet across the country. Here I am referring to the UK however this issue can be applied to any country. Generally, this is a governmental issue and needs addressing at a national level however it is one which schools can have some impact either through access to the schools infrastructure outside normal hours or possibly through mobile service provider solutions as two possible approaches.
Devices: Next is access to devices for students to use at home. How these devices are provided isn’t important, whether this be devices the students/parents own, or devices provided by schools or other organisations, the key thing is that students have access to a device. Ideally this should follow internet access however at a push it doesn’t have to; If students have devices they can at least use software locally installed, or free Wi-Fi hotspots should they not have access to reliable Wi-Fi at home. Yes, this will require funding and I am under no illusions as to the extent of funding required, however in the meantime we can at least attempt to achieve what is reasonably possible through partnerships between schools and also with charitable and commercial organisations.
Training: My next focus area is training for parents not in the technical issues of IT but in how they, as a parent, can support their child in using technology in their learning at home. I remember my old man helping me with Maths homework but at that time it was all pencil and paper, so he didn’t need anything more than a bit of maths knowledge and an interest in supporting me. Now we still require the above but in addition parents need a little IT know how to access online platforms and understand how information might be stored/organised and what might be expected of students using these platforms. Schools need to seek to support parents in this area. Now there already are lots of examples of this in resources being created in schools and shared online. Each school needs to consider what it offers and look to build on this.
Conclusion
Providing printed copies of worksheets to all because some may not have reliable Wi-if is no longer the answer. Sending worksheets to student via email or via an app may be progress, but is it enough and should we be doing more? We first must seek to find out what our students and their families have in terms of technology. Armed with this information we can then look to how schools can support students learning using technology at home. This will take some creativity to get correct and for some schools with limited resources I suspect this may still be printing out booklets, but for many there are at least steps which can be taken now or in the near future. The digital divide (or divides) is an impossible problem for which a solution may not exist but at least we can seek to continually improve and give students the best technology enabled learning experiences possible, preparing them for the technological world we now live in. And if you needed evidence of this technological world we need to prepare students for just take one look at the world today with the massive growth of work from home during this period of isolation and the use of video conferencing tools to stay in touch and even to socialise. I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I believe things will never quite be the same again following Covid-19. These unprecedented events have the potential to act as the catalyst for a number of EdTech changes in particular. For example, I have read a few comments over the last week where EdTech initiatives which have been slow to progress, often being discussed in schools over a number of years with little movement, have suddenly been quickly progressed due to Covid-19 and the immediate need for online remote learning. Due to this I thought I would share some thoughts as to what might change beyond the current crisis:
Flipped / Blended Learning
Over the last week or so since schools closed teachers who previously hadn’t had much experience of creating video learning content have suddenly found themselves creating content. Some of this video has been live through Zoom, Hangouts or Teams, or has been posted for on demand access through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, FlipGrid and even TikTok or through school Virtual Learning Environments. Although discussions of flipped or blended learning have been ongoing for some time, Covid-19 has led to a peak in interest plus to a rapid upskilling of teachers driven by a specific and immediate need. With this greater interest and skill level I would predict that we will see greater use of video, and in particular pre-prepared video which can be used or accessed on demand within schools and learning, similar to the lecture capture concept which has become more common in Higher Education.
Digital Skills
The current situation has required the rapid upskilling of teachers to facilitate online remote learning. Lots of resources have been quickly pulled together and curated by various groups of individuals and organisations. The importance of a teachers digital skillset has become never more apparent and with this it is likely to see increasing levels of importance beyond the current crisis. Schools will need to asses what their strengths and areas for development are in relation to the use of EdTech by staff, and how they might address the identified needs. I should also mention that infrastructure and IT support are also likely to need to be considered as these are cornerstones of successful EdTech usage.
Remote / Distance Learning
The benefits in the use of video to engage remote learners, allow for remote teachers and also provide on-demand learning materials has become clear to a significantly greater number of educators during this period of lockdown. It may even be that parents and our students are now more aware of what is possible, and therefore are likely to have greater expectations as to what schools should provide once we progress beyond the current crisis.. As such I believe the student absent from school may no longer be excluded from the days learning in the way they have been in the past, and we may see students accessing learning remotely becoming more common.
Personalisation rather than differentiation
Remote learning has shown us how students can actually access learning in their own time, space and also personal way. In addition, some of the tools such as Microsoft’s Accessibility tools, for example, also allow for the language to be changed or the font size or background colour, all customizable to meet the end users, the students, needs. This customization at the point of consumption, as opposed to differentiation at the point of delivery, is likely to significantly increase. As such teachers are likely to need to think about how the learning they design, deliver and facilitate will offer sufficient flexibility to allow for students to personalise.
Work from home
When we talk about schools we immediate think of the physical buildings, same as when we talk about work, there is a physicality about it. I saw a great tweet referring to school being the students as opposed to the physical building. What covid-19 has taught us is that this physicality is in our heads, an illusion, and that in reality our school or place of work isn’t as reliant on the physical space as we thought. Our school or work can, to a greater or lesser extent, exist virtually and online. This is likely to be a significant challenge as we are, as humans, creatures of habit and therefore not travelling to a physical place of work, or to a physical school, may be a difficult change for us to adjust to however I think we will see increasing consideration around flexibility. Workers may be allowed work from home days and some schools may adopt timetables or schedules including virtual school time or virtual school days. We may also see a growth around online only schools.
Online socialising
For me our students online social media habits have to date been seen in a very negative light, being thought of as being anti-social or changing in their behaviour or attention spans. The last week has however shown how the online world can provide opportunities for socialising as much as the real world can, albeit in different ways. We have seen virtual pubs, lots of online Karaoke, community groups and much more form quickly online to overcome the challenges of social distancing and the potential harm of individual isolation. Thinking about children, and how parents may be overprotective and concerned of the dangers in the real world, therefore leading our students to be more isolated than they would have been in the past; For me I remember parental comments about returning home “before the street lights come on”. This kind of freedom to socialise in real life isn’t afforded in anyway to the same extent for the current generation of children. Is it therefore any wonder they would look to use the online world? I think going forward there will be a greater acceptance of the benefits of the hyper connectedness which our students already experience through the many apps they use.
The Bigger Players
We have seen over the last week a number of school services overwhelmed by increasing demand and traffic as schools and workplaces across the globe shifted to remote learning and remote working. Even the big players like Microsoft and Google have had some issues in this period of unprecedented demand. In looking at these issues, although the bigger services were negatively impacted by demand they also tend to have greater capacity to upscale and recover quickly, greater resiliency, where need arises hence I think we will see a number of small EdTech companies disappear as they loose out on business to the big players. This shift will have both positive and negative implications. We may lose some interested and useful solutions to a difficult financial climate while homogenising on common functionality which will be seen across all schools.
Data Protection/Cyber
Although most of the above is positive I do have some concerns. I am worried that as people rushed to find solutions to overcome isolation, maintain social connection, etc, that they didn’t show due care for the protection of their personal data and for the resultant cyber risk. Great communities may have formed overnight using free services but what data did we give away regarding these groups and the individuals within them. It worries me that when things do settle down, we may realise that some decisions made have negative consequences. I suspect the pendulum which swings between individual privacy and public good, and which previously tended towards individual privacy may have shifted somewhat and may now tend more towards the public good. In some ways this may be a good thing, but what may be a good thing in a crisis may not be a good thing when everything returns to normality or near normality.
Conclusion
It may be possible that I am wrong about the above and that the world simply acts like an elastic band and springs back towards the normal which existed prior to Covid-19. It may equally be that Covid-19 acts as a catalyst for wide ranging change and a new normal, distinctly different from what existed before, is established. The likelihood is that the world will find a position somewhere between these two possibilities, with some schools embracing change and others not. It is also worth noting that the world education sector is likely to see some significant change especially around fee paying schools operating internationally. I know from my own experience working in the Middle East that some of these schools rely fully on fee income and that this period where parents may be unable to afford fees due to job losses will result in significant uncertainty and some difficult decisions. For ex-Pat teachers this will be a period of great concern. My thoughts go out to these schools and their staff, and in particular to the schools and staff I personally worked with. My thoughts are also with those who have lost loved ones, and to those who will likely lose loved ones on the weeks and months to come.
The above represent my thoughts on what might change following this crisis. Only time will now tell how close or far I am from the truth.
The current outbreak of the Corona virus has highlighted a particular educational need which I believe EdTech is well placed to fill; the need for learning to continue when staff and/or students are unable to actually attend school either due to forced closures or individual illness or through forced isolation such as is required in relation to containing the Corona virus.
There are a wide variety of platforms in use in schools which can support remote learning plus platforms which can easily be put into place and even some companies offering their platforms free during this current crisis such as Centurys offer to Asian schools. Sadly, as the list of options is very long plus I don’t personally have experience of all possible solutions and configurations, for the purposes of this post I am going to focus on the solutions I do have experience of.
I am going to start with Microsoft Teams as it is the one which immediately jumps to mind, in particular its “Meet Now” functionality. The reason this functionality is first to my thoughts is my belief in learning as a social experience and therefore the need for interaction beyond simple file sharing, ideally in a video format complete with all the non-verbal cues present in our normal day to day interactions with others. Via Meet Now lesson content can be shared as a live video stream including the ability to share desktop content such as presentations or worked examples, etc. This is very useful for conducting a lesson remotely or allowing students to access a lesson remotely however it also includes the ability for the video stream to be automatically recorded so that students can also view it after the event, in an “on demand” basis. Microsoft will also automatically transcribe the video making it easily searchable however I note that this very much depends on the quality of the audio within the video and the pace of speech, the accents of individuals speaking, etc so it isn’t full proof.
As well as in a class or group context Teams can also be used on a 1:1 basis to allow teachers to conduct video calls with students independent of the device they are using and their location. Using the Chat facility, a video call can easily be started and again both student and teacher have the ability to share their desktop and/or share files as needed. Where bandwidth is an issue, rather than using video, teachers and students can fall back to a text-based discussion albeit I believe video is generally preferable. A student with a mobile phone and a cellular contract could therefore interact with their teacher from a quiet room at home or even while on a bus or train.
In relation to using Teams Microsoft have already shared some advice for where schools want to enable and use of Teams. You can view this info here. If seeking to setup Teams quickly, assuming an Office 365 tenancy is in place complete with student accounts, my suggestion would be to enable teachers to create teams for their classes and support them to use Team Codes to allow students to join the relevant class. This means everything can quickly be put in place to allow for use of Teams.
In terms of more static content such as learning resources, worksheets, etc, which you might want students to access, this ideally could be delivered through whichever learning platform is in use within a school. Teams can also provide this facility or a SharePoint site, another component of office 365, could be quickly created to host the relevant learning content files. OneNote could also provide such static content however additionally OneNote can allow teachers to provide written and even verbal feedback to students on their work allowing a more realistic two-way communication and learning experience to be developed. I suspect I could actually write a piece on OneNote on its own however for now the above will need to suffice.
Personally, I also think Flipgrid is worthy of mention as another possible video related solution which can be put in place quickly allowing teachers to share video content with students and students to reply again with video. I think this could be useful for creating the feeling of group discussion where the students are in diverse locations and may not be able to access the video stream at a specified time. Another app worthy of mention would be Wakelet in its potential use by teachers to collate resources quickly and easily ready for students to access as, when and where needed.
The options are many and I have barely scratched the surface. I have focussed on the Microsoft solutions however Google offer similar functionality for those schools using G-suite rather than Office 365. The reality is that there isn’t one correct solution, there are many possibilities and a schools chosen approach needs to fit the individual school. I also think we need to share ideas and thoughts on this as situations like this may become more common either related to illnesses like currently, due to natural disasters or environmental conditions or due to other events, hence this post. Mark Steeds comments are particularly useful as they come from actual experience of this rather than simply theory which I need to admit my views above are. I also think we need to acknowledge that outside of dramatic events, the ability for remote learning to be possible and even encouraged is something we need to give more consideration to. Using technology to enable and support remote learning is another tool in the teachers toolbox; A tool which is particularly powerful in reaching individual students with individual needs. Why, therefore, should it be restricted to use during special circumstances such as viral outbreak?
[Updated 06/03/2020]
A couple of additional Microsoft resources have been brought to my attention and are listed below (thanks to Ian Stuart, @IanStuart66 for highlighting):
Following on from the #DigiLearnSector twitter chat last night I thought I would share some of the Did you know tips which we have been sharing within our school.
We currently share Did you know tips weekly in an IT Services section within the whole school bulletin. Each tip is designed to a be simple idea, tool or piece of functionality which is easy to use and easy to explain, leading to what we hope are simple bite sized tips. We have now been doing this for a couple months, since shortly after the bulletin document was introduced and as a result there are around 9 tips in the document currently.
You can access the consolidated Did you know tips here. I will hopefully update this periodically given we will continue to add a new tip to our list each week.
I hope you find this useful.
Microsoft recently introduced the ability to upload files as part of MS Forms, or at least it only just started appearing in UK tenants. This is functionality I had been waiting for as it makes MS Forms so much more flexible and useful especially for situations where you might want users to upload a document or image as part of a form return. I therefore thought it might be useful to blog a little about this new functionality in use.
Adding a form upload to a form is almost as easy as adding any other question type. Simply click the Add new option then use the arrow to the right of the question types to then allow you to select the File Upload question type.
You can now enter the question which will be associated with the file upload. This might be as simple as “Upload your file(s) here” or might state the type of files you want people to upload such as “Upload your images”, etc. Each file upload question also comes complete with the ability to adjust the number of files that can be uploaded up to a maximum of 10 or you can also add more than one file upload question to a single form. This provides flexibility in how you want users to upload their files, either uploading all relevant files in a single upload question or uploading each required file to a different question.
You can also set the limitations in terms of file size with options for 10Mb, 100Mb and 1Gb. My advice here would be to limit to smaller file sizes just to avoid potential upload issues where users have limited bandwidth however I haven’t personally tested uploading 1Gb files so it may work perfectly well.
Once you have setup the above and shared your form the next bit is being able to review submitted files. For my example I setup a form from my own user account meaning that Forms automatically created a folder in my OneDrive to store the files. I assume if a form was setup in Teams it would equally create a file store in teams and store the uploaded files there. The files are basically stored in the Microsoft Forms subfolder within the Apps folder which will appear in your OneDrive. Inside this folder a new folder titled to match the forms title will appear. This allows you to easily identify which files relate to which of your forms.
Files uploaded retain their original file name based on the file being uploaded by users however this has the name of the user appended to it. This highlights one limitation of MS Forms in that you need to be a user within the Office 365 tenant to upload files, so you can’t create a publicly accessible form which allows unauthenticated users to upload files. Although a limitation, I see this as only a minor issue as I can see potentially significant risk if unauthenticated uploads were supported.
If a user uploads the same file more than once Forms simply enumerates the filename appending 1, 2, 3, etc to it to identify each separate upload of the file.
One feature I particularly like is when you export the responses from your Form to excel. For each file upload the URL link is provided in the resultant spreadsheet with this link taking you to the relevant file in OneDrive with multiple file uploads listed in a cell but separated by a semi-colon. This will mean that for multiple file upload questions you may need to do a little processing on individual cells if you want to separate each link into a different cell however this is relatively simple to do.
Overall, I love this additional functionality in Microsoft Teams and look forward to making increasing use of it going forward.
Its BETT this week! Will be popping down to have a brief look on Thursday and also to speak at the EdTech UK Conversations event also on Thursday. Given the shortness of my visit to BETT I am unlikely to be able to make the most of the various talks and presentations which will be going on. Sadly, there is little I am able to do about this although I will be planning for a more significant visit to BETT next year assuming my brief visit turns out to be worthwhile.
I expect the BETT event will once again have lots of Interactive Panels and Projectors on display, something which I am not so positive about. A quick look at the exhibitor list highlights 39 vendors in the Interactive Whiteboard Category; Am not sure why this 25+ year old technology still occupies such a significant portion of what BETT has to offer. Of particular interest to my visit will be those exhibitors focussing on STEAM and also AI solutions. There’s lots of buzz around AI, and I like what Century.Tech are doing, however there are also lots of people saying they are using AI where I am not sure they really are. I note “Find a stand sharing an AI product that has no AI” on the BETT Bingo card which seems to agree with this perception. I will also be very interested in any solutions focussed on supporting the development of digital citizenship in schools. Digital Citizenship has been a particular focus of mine recently and I must admit that the lack of a category for this in the BETT show guide worries me. My hope however is that vendors covering Digital Citizenship will simply be under different categories. The Microsoft, iSAMS, Century Tech and Netsupport stands will also all be on my list for a quick visit.
I expect it to be a busy day in terms of travel, BETT and EdTech Conversations. I look forward to it, to catching up with people and also meeting new people or meeting in real life for the first time. I will try and share my thoughts and experience shortly after my visit.
Technology and Learning