Microsoft recently rolled out more updates to Teams, increasing the functionality and usability and improving user experience with meetings, chats and collaboration.
What’s new?
Live captions with speaker attribution
Microsoft Teams have added speaker attribution to live captions. This means that you can see who is speaking along with what is being said, adding further inclusivity to online meetings. This help guide looks at captioning in more detail: https://eatsupport.tees.ac.uk/staff/knowledgebase/captions-in-microsoft-teams/
Spotlight an individual participant for all attendees during Teams meetings
Presenters within a Teams meeting can now pin an individual video feed for all attendees to see. The individual identified as the ‘spotlight’ will be the main video shown to all participants. This feature can be useful for presenting online lectures to a class during the hybrid learning model, as it means focus can be on the tutor without the distraction of a number of different screens for students to view.
Another way in which this feature could be useful is for student presentations, the spotlight could be transferred between each student that is presenting and will highlight them as the focal point of the discussion.
Prevent attendees from unmuting during a Teams meeting
This is a great session moderation tool as it prevents numerous members of the class or meeting from talking over each other and further imitates a classroom setting. Attendees can raise their hand if they wish to ask question or make a comment, and the session moderator can unmute their mic for this purpose. The muting option is also great for those students that have accidentally left their mics on without realising, or may be unsure on how to turn it off.
Microsoft Whiteboard read only mode
This is another session moderation tool that would be useful during online lectures. It allows you to present your whiteboard in a way that does not allow other attendees to edit it. This can be great for carrying out demonstrations or providing information about a certain topic that isn’t necessarily an active learning session. The whiteboard can be changed from read only to edit mode, which means that attendees can add to the whiteboard if they wish at this point. Whiteboards can also be saved and uploaded later into Blackboard as a reminder of what discussions took place in a session.
For any further information or assistance, please contact eLearning@tees.ac.uk