What is Microsoft Teams for Education?
Microsoft Teams for Education is the company's flagship education platform. The service was initially announced in 2017 and subsequently released the following year. Teams replaced Microsoft Classroom, which was introduced as part of the Office 365 Education suite but was retired less than 2 years after its release.
Teams for Education offers several classroom functions, including the management of assignments, grade books, and notebooks. The platform also natively integrates with other Microsoft Office 365 applications, such as Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Excel. Quizzes can be assigned to students through Office Forms. Several integrations with third-party applications also exist.
Similar to Google's model for Classroom, Microsoft offers the service for free for accredited school districts and academic institutions. School IT administrators can create specific teams for classes, learning communities, faculty, and parents. Admins may also enable the syncing of gradebooks between Teams and a few supported SISs, such as PowerSchool.
The Future
The adoption of Microsoft Teams has been readily increasing, with a total active user base of 20 million (as of November 19, 2019). This figure includes a growing number of schools and educational institutions that are adopting Microsoft Teams for Education. As more schools start to onboard onto Microsoft Teams for Education, Microsoft and third-party developers will need to build integrations that allow for the exchange of data between Teams and other information services, such as LMSs and SISs.
Read More on Microsoft Teams
Here are other articles we’ve written on Microsfot Teams to help you on your integration journey:
- Integrating with Microsoft Teams for Education
- API vs LTI Integrations for Microsoft Teams
- How to Use the Microsoft Graph API to Integrate with Microsoft Teams
- How to Implement SSO with Microsoft Teams
- Google Classroom vs. Microsoft Teams: A Side-by-Side Integration Comparison
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If you're looking for a partner who can help guide you through developing LMS integrations (like these), then let’s introduce ourselves. We’re Edlink!