What is Microsoft Teams for Education?

Teams is a workplace chat, conferencing, and collaboration platform designed primarily for businesses. In 2017, Microsoft replaced its online learning platform, Microsoft Classroom, with a version of Teams tailored to education.

The education suite of Microsoft Teams builds onto the existing Teams platform and introduces several features designed for the classroom. The Office 365 Education edition of Teams supports assignment creation, grade books, notebooks, and integrations with, Microsoft products (e.g. Word, PowerPoint, etc.) and third-party software. Any school or teacher with an Office 365 Education account has free access to Teams. Additionally, only teachers, students, and verified educational institutions have access to this version of Microsoft Teams.

Integrating with Microsoft Teams for Education

Microsoft allows third-party developers to integrate applications to its suite of Microsoft products with the Microsoft Graph platform. In other LMSs, developers usually have the option to integrate within LTI, but Microsoft Teams for Education doesn’t support the standard – making API integration the only choice. Graph supports integrations with Microsoft School Data Sync (SDS), Office 365 Education, and Microsoft Teams.

The education API in Microsoft Graph gives developers the ability to create resources (think assignments and courses) in Teams from the developer’s application. For example, a teacher using a third-party app could send an assignment to the class in Teams via the API. After students complete the assignment, the API can be used to send grades back to each individual student.

Additionally, data such as class names, roster info, and lists of schools, can be retrieved using the API. To gain access to a district's data, the administrator of the district must approve the integration.

All of the endpoints available via the API can be found in Microsoft's documentation of its Graph API.

Read More on Microsoft Teams

Here are other articles we’ve written on integrating with Microsoft Teams to help you on your journey:

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!