Why Microsoft Teams?
At Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, we love using Microsoft Teams to get things done, stay organized, and keep focused. Teams is a wonderful tool for day-to-day activity across the college, and you may be surprised to discover that it is equally as great of a tool for online learning!
Student-Driven Learning
With Microsoft Teams, students have the opportunity to take charge of their learning and engage in valuble discussions with both the instructor and their classmates at any point during their class enrollment. Discussions and learning do not stop when class time ends, as the door - or shall we say chatroom - is always open for questions and commentary. This allows the students to dive-deeper into the topics that interest them, ultimately providing greater insight from other points of view and explainations.
Collaboration Powerhouse
As many students know, study groups can be a life-saver when trying to learn new topics. With collaboration being the heart and soul of Microsoft Teams, working with others is an absolute breeze. Students can have one-on-one, group, and class-wide discussions within the software. In addition, these discussions can be held through chat, calls, video calls, or even a mixture of all three! Students can share notes with others, collaborate in real-time on assignments and study guides, and genuinely enjoy participating with all the fun features of emojis, gifs, and stickers.
Classroom Content Focused
If collaboration is the heart of Microsoft Teams, the content built by instructors would be the bones and structure of each class team. Because each class team is connected to a SharePoint site on the "back-end", every channel has a corresponding folder for content to live. All while never leaving Microsoft Teams, classroom content can be created, updated, organized, and shared from semester to semester without worry of losing anything considering everything syncs automatically back into SharePoint.
Easily Integrable
Instructors can chose from a variety integratable applications to plug into their class teams, such as Polly, Quizlet, YouTube and many more. Once added, these applications essentially live inside the team, and students never even have to open their internet browser. This seamless integration does wonders for keeping everyone on-track and focused on classwork rather than accidently getting stucked into social media despite good intentions - we've all been there!