Start Integrating with Microsoft Teams for Education

by Jordan Clark

Microsoft has always been a major player in the edtech space. Microsoft's strategy in education is to offer its suite of software for free to schools to prepare students to use Microsoft products at the university level and for future jobs. Microsoft offers special pricing on its devices and complimentary access to Office 365 for schools, teachers, and students. This suite, called Office 365 Education, includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams is a more recent addition to the Office 365 suite. 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.

What is Microsoft Teams for 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, gradebooks, notebooks, and integrations with, both, 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 schools that are verified educational institutions have access to this version of Microsoft Teams.

Integrating with Microsoft Teams for Education

Microsoft allows third-party developers to integrate their applications with its suite of products with the Microsoft Graph platform. Graph also 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, such as assignments and courses, in Teams from their own applications. For example, a teacher using a third-party app could send an assignment to their class in Teams via the API. After students complete the assignment, the API could also be used to send grades back to each individual student.

Additionally, data such as class names, roster info, and lists of schools, can all be retrieved using the API. In order 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 their 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!