What’s New in EDU: Live from ISTE 2018

 |   Microsoft Global News Center

Educators from across the globe are bringing their passions, experiences and big-change ideas together again for the 2018 ISTE Conference and Expo, kicking off this week in Chicago, Illinois. And if forward-thinking teachers and time-saving tech advancements are going to be there, that means What’s New in EDU is going to be there too.

We’re debuting brand new episodes of What’s New in EDU, our round-up of the latest efforts and products from Microsoft Education, throughout the week of ISTE. You can tune in to each episode live, even if you’re #notatISTE, so keep an eye on the schedule below:

What’s New in EDU was Live from ISTE on Day 1

What’s New in EDU was Live from ISTE on Day 2

What’s New in EDU: Live from ISTE Day 3 coming on Wednesday: 5:00 PM CDT on Facebook Live

There’s a lot of exciting news to cover this week, including our announcement of Minecraft: Education Edition’s Update Aquatic and our partnership with BBC Learning on new, cost-effective STEM lesson plans. We also have an update on free workshops coming to Microsoft Store locations that help educators attain Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) certification.

If you’re an educator:

Office 365 Education helps create engaging learning experiences for today’s classrooms. Using the products you already know and love like Word, OneNote, and PowerPoint, reach students with features that help you create personalized learning experiences.

  • Dictation: This simple yet transformative tool helps students write freely and conquer the blank page using their voice. Dictation is now available for Word and PowerPoint on Win32 as well as OneNote for Windows 10.

New OneNote Sticker Packs: Have you ever been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest canyon in the world? Did you know that an octopus can collect shells to make armor to fight off sharks? We’ve created four new sticker packs that explore the ocean and the marine life that call it home! We take a look at coral reefs, tide pools, the deepest parts of the ocean, and those larger species that need a little more space in the open ocean.

Learning Tools:  13,000,000 people round the globe regularly use Learning Tools to help them achieve more in school and at home. As part of Learning Tools, Immersive Reader implements proven techniques to improve reading for learners regardless of their age or ability.

  • Parts of Speech symbols: Teachers and students have the option to enable symbols for nouns, verbs, and adjectives over the highlighted part of speech. This is especially useful for readers who are color blind.
  • Adverbs: The Immersive Reader has had the ability to highlight important parts of speech, including nouns, verbs, and adjectives. We listened to valuable feedback from teachers that adverbs are also an important part of speech that should be highlighted and now adverbs are available in over 10 languages.

Microsoft Teams is the digital hub that brings conversations, content, assignments, and apps together in one place. Educators can create collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, and communicate with school staff – all from a single experience in Office 365 Education.

This month, Teams celebrates its first-year anniversary! Read more about the news, including new educator stories – and discover free teacher training materials.

  • Rubrics Grading: Utilize rubric grading and skills-based grading of your assignments making it easier to deliver feedback to your students. Students will also be able to see how they’ll be assessed upfront, before they start working on the assignment. Teachers can save a lot of time with a grading tool that’s easily applied to multiple assignments at once.
  • Forms in Assignments: In Assignments, you’ll be able to add a Form to a new assignment for your students to fill out and return. Leverage features of Forms reporting functionality, like auto-grading, feedback, and scores, directly in the Assignments grade book and keep track of scores across many Forms-powered quizzes.
  • Join Codes: Create a simple code for members to join your Class, PLC, or Staff team. This makes it easy for many people to join your team all at once. Display the code in ‘projector mode’ so that everyone in the classroom can see it and join the team.
  • Reusing a team as a template: Teachers can reuse an existing team as a template when creating a new team, then customize what they want to copy over: channels, team setting, apps, and even users.
  • Mute all students: There’s a time for conversation, and there’s a time for focus. You can now pause students from posting in the conversation tab.
  • Page locking in OneNote assignments – For teachers creating OneNote assignments, the pages of the student will now automatically “lock” as read only when the due date/time passes. The teacher can still edit and annotate these OneNote assignment pages with feedback.
  • Archive teams: Safely store your Class, PLC, or Staff team content in read-only mode. Easily reference archived teams while you are setting up your Teams experience for the next school year.

Open Up Resources:  Open Up Resources is a nonprofit working to develop the highest quality full-course Open Educational Resources (OER) curricula, standards-aligned, and provided for free to promote instructional equity. This curriculum was developed by Illustrative Mathematics, and currently covers 6th – 8th Grade Math. Recently, EdReports gave this curriculum their highest rating ever.

 OneNote empowers teachers and students to capture information and stay organized in their digital notebook.  OneNote allows students to organize their notes, ideate with others, and sync their notes seamlessly via the cloud.

  • Math Assistant Understanding the steps of a complex math problem is key to finding a solution. Math Assistant in OneNote Online helps this process by showing solution steps, as well as providing a graph for easier visualization. Read more about Math Assistant in OneNote online here.

OneNote Class Notebooks helps teachers capture and organize class content, create and deliver interactive lessons, provide feedback, and collaborate. Teachers can create a personal workspace for every student, a content library for handouts, and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities. This school year, 25,000,000 student notebooks have been created!

  • Page Locking: Page locking allows teachers to prevent unwanted editing by students. Teachers can lock pages as read-only after giving feedback to the student but can still edit the locked pages themselves. Read more about Page locking in OneNote Class Notebooks here.
  • Teacher Transfer: This highly requested tool allows school IT professional to help transfer Class Notebooks from one teacher to another or to different schools when teachers change positions, saving valuable time and information.

Page Locking in OneNote for Windows 10

Microsoft Forms helps teachers quickly create polls, quizzes, and assessments, and see results as they come in. Microsoft Forms is simple to use, works on any browser and device, and lets you assign points for automatic grading.

  • Math Quiz: With additional tools to create math questions and worksheets, teachers can broaden the type of questions they ask in Forms to better assess Math skills. Read more about Math Quiz in Microsoft Forms here.

Microsoft Sway helps teachers and students easily create immersive, interactive presentations with images, text, videos, and other multimedia.

  • Refreshed iOS app: Updates to the iOS app include new commands that make it a breeze to add and organize content on-the-go.  Students and teachers will be able to easily incorporate their mobile captures, use drag-and-drop, tap to resize content, and instantly work together by using Sways Near Me.  Read more about the updates in our latest blog post.

Microsoft MakeCode brings computer science to life for all students with fun projects, immediate results, and both block and text editors for learners at different levels. MakeCode takes a unique approach to Computing Education by combining the magic of Making with the power of Code as a way to make learning about computers and technology more accessible, and interesting to a wider audience of students.

  • MakeCode for LEGO MINDSTORMS: Microsoft MakeCode provides a very easy on-ramp into robotics with LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 by providing students with both a block-based, and text-based coding environment.  And because it’s browser-based, schools can use MakeCode for MINDSTORMS on any computer. For more details view this blog post.

 The Microsoft Photos app features a built-in video editor, making it easy for you and your students to create movies using photos, video clips, music, 3D models, and Hollywood-style special effects. Whether it’s a group history project, a lab report, or a music video just for fun, you can quickly sequence your project, add titles, drop in music, and enhance your story with special effects.

  • Timeline scrollbar: The new timeline scrollbar makes it easy to jump to a specific month or year to see the photos and videos you captured on a that date. The scrollbar is tailored to your collection, showing you at a glance where your biggest capture sessions have been and how your photos and videos are distributed over time.

Change the date on a photo or video: Have you ever taken pictures on a camera that didn’t have the date and time set correctly? Now it’s easy to get that media showing up correctly in your collection. Just right-click on an image or video to change the date.

Microsoft Store locations in the U.S. are offering free MIE workshops:

You might already be familiar with the Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) program, which teaches educators of all levels how to integrate technology and Microsoft tools into the classroom to improve their students’ learning experience. This program was previously only offered online, but now for the first time ever, Microsoft Store locations in the U.S. are offering free MIE workshops for educators who prefer an in-person learning experience.

Workshops are taught by associates who are certified MIE Experts, and just like the online MIE training programs, educators earn credit to become a certified MIE. To learn more, educators are invited to stop in anytime at their local Microsoft Store and speak with the Community Development Specialist.

If you focus on IT:

Intune for Education makes it easy to set up and manage Windows 10 devices in just a few steps, including deploying apps or settings to users, and managing shared devices.

  • User and Device Details Pages: At a basic level, administrators want to be sure that everything is working as expected so that the in-classroom experience is focused on learning. The basic question we hear from these admins is: “When student ‘X’ signed in to device ‘Y’, what should have been applied and what was actually applied?”  To help resolve this requirement, we have added a key feature for admins: Once they find the user/device in the management console, they can now see which settings and apps should be applied plus the deployment status for a user/device.

School Data Sync (SDS) simplifies class creation and management in Office 365. SDS reads from your Student Information Systems (SIS) and creates classes and groups for Microsoft Teams, OneNote Class Notebooks, Intune for Education, and third-party applications. Best of all, it’s free!

  • Education Security Groups: SDS creates new Education Security Groups by default. The new groups will include the All Teachers, All Students, Teachers of School, and Students of School. These groups can be used for Intune for Education device policy, Group Based Licensing, Conditional Access Policy, and several other O365 security management features.
  • Expired Class Management: SDS provides options to rename expired classes, remove student access from expired classes. This new experience simplifies class management for term transition and back-to-school cycles.

To learn more about Microsoft Education and our tools and technology that help foster inclusion and support personalizing learning for every student, click here.