Dashboard rather than Conversation as the home page of each Team
Rather than see a conversation as the starting point of each Team, I'd like to see a dashboard. That is, recent conversation activity, Assessments due, calendar events, recent files, homework reminders etc ...
Vince Papa
shared this idea
Thank you all for your continued feedback on this feature! We are still evaluating options, so for now the ‘Posts’ tab remains the default first tab for every team.
Great suggestions so far in the comments, but please do continue to share how you would use this feature so we can better understand the use case for our planning.
60 comments
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Kat Lindsey
commented
Better yet, make it customizable?
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Anonymous
commented
in some group chat systems, you can have a pinned announcement that everyone sees all the time.
that would be good for team status ("everyone, remember we have a code freeze!") -
Sommer R
commented
I am not sure that I am contributing anything new at this point, but I definitely agree with a Dashboard landing page option. Particularly as Teams continues to be marketed as a Learning Management System this is very important! It was an option that my school was excited about getting from MS Classroom that we never got to experience because it was discontinued in favor of MS Teams. Using Teams as a Hub of learning is an awesome idea that I would love to be able to get full use out of in my classrooms. A "homepage" rather than just a straight feed would continue to developed that need and desire from many MANY teachers.
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Hugues
commented
The problem with an activity "feed" as the main home page, is that it doesn't allow to highlight the key information not to be forgotten by students. It is nice to have an activity feed somewhere, but for a student, being able to quickly know what are the "urgent" key actions/requirements/steps to be performed are key. There are so much confronted with "feeds" and used to ephemeral information; what they have missed is lost...Only the very careful students would scroll....and scroll....and scroll. But we are facing an adverse selection here: the ones that need to be reminded will be the last ones to be patient and careful enough to...scroll....scroll....scroll... Believe our experience of pedagogue!
It would be nice that:
1) a key list of items and todos can appear as the homepage for each group, as a table sortable by date our importance/urgency.
2) where each student can see his/her own "checks" of the items of the list (so each user has an instance of that list).
3) and each user can have a global list, across all groups, with the merged list of items so that a student doesn't have to click on each group he is a member of, to avoid missing something...A list could be partly automatically fed by the elements of the course like assignments (the admin of the group chooses in "settings" which elements created automatically populate the dashboard list), and can be complemented by tasks/items input manually by the admin.
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Jessica
commented
The way things are currently set up makes everything look sloppy. I either have to have my calendar open, my chats, my contacts, or teams (many of which do not get used regularly) but it feels like having a computer desktop within a computer desktop and I have to click click click click to get where I need to go when I get a chat message, or a post in teams. I want to be able to hide all of those things so I'm not looking at random chat messages all day.
It seems like Teams is set up like the outlook preview view, but it needs to be set up more like a smartphone screen, with apps and such to actually be intuitive and functional. I don't want to click an ellipses, or click through a bunch of menus every time I need to find something, and I don't want to look at a chat preview all day long.
Why can't we just have a customizable dashboard, or landing page for all of this? -
Michael C.
commented
Teachers at my district would love to have the dashboard be customizable for their class. They describe it as when students first walk into a classroom there is usually a bulletin board/whiteboard with information on it, such as upcoming events, announcements, assignments, word of the day, saying, etc.
It would be like a landing page of a website, allowing students to get information quickly and navigate to other tabs within the Team or links to external websites. Essentially teachers can "pin" important information on the Dashboard so that it does not get lost in the Posts section.
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Sebastian Oort
commented
I'd love a dashboard (a 'today' screen with relevant notices, calendar and assignment stuff),
AND also just have Teams open default to a tab i choose (like a sharepoint page, or a form, or anything really). My usecase is simple: we have dedicated teams for specific stuff: like requesting an exam. We're not really using the communication part of teams in that, but we want to keep teams the 'one stop shop' for our students. Main thing that would really help me is have me set the default tab other than the chat of a channel. I can work from there :)
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Christian Montague
commented
Yah, Sort of like Email and Outlook?
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Anonymous
commented
As someone with a Masters degree in Instructional Design and Technology I completely agree with this dashboard upgrade.
The user interface is not intuitive for students. Students need a place where they can land and graphically see a list of icons or items that they can contribute to. This is currently the biggest weakness I can find in teams. This would help to move MS Teams to an effective learning managements system for educators.
It would also be great to partner with Khan Academy to make an SSO available. They currently do not support a Microsoft SSO.
Thanks,
Christy McManus -
Mark Burland
commented
I've no doubt something like this is in the pipe for the Teams application as a whole. Within an education classroom setting, I'm sure it would be handy if teachers could have something like a "This week we are...", a summary of assignments and an area for reminders for each class.
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S
commented
Yeeeesss! A dashboard would provide each member of my team with all the relevant information they need to know at-a-glance. Allowing the ability to choose when they consume the content without having to dig for it in an inbox. Saving time because they can rely on this panel of information. The layout would almost look like the frontpage of a newsletter. Fields of any size or shape where you can import files to display. With all the freedom of a power point slide.
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Anonymous
commented
This would be great!
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Isaiah Welch
commented
A dashboard with everything I need to know at a glance would be very useful. Things I'd say would be good to add would be a calendar that shows you what is coming up in your day, a condensed assignments list that features what is due the soonest, a notification centre that shows you any activity in your Teams and chats, and maybe even a little message of encouragement to keep you going.
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Hillary Einziger
commented
It would be great if there was a way to post announcements in a dashboard like that, separately from the "General" conversations. I've kind of found a work-around by making the General channel so that only I can post there, and that's where I post announcements, and then if students have questions or anything, I set up a separate channel for discussions where anyone can post, but a lot of students seem to not remember that the discussion channel exists.
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HM PEMS RJY
commented
This feature is very much needed in teams. Instead of changing the tabs for each and every information, it is better to have a dashboard with an overview of all options and to check an option to view the detail of it. Under review posted on 3rd of April, 2020. Still now completed. Very pity.
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Anonymous
commented
Yes, the conversation page is so confusing - it's like wading through a refuse bin of random scraps. Why can't there be a simple dashboard?
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Anonymous
commented
Look at something like Canvas - my home page there has a short 'recent announcements' block, an 'overdue assignments' that populates with assignments a student has not turned in on time yet, an 'upcoming assignments' block that populates with assignments that are due soon that a student still needs to turn in, and an 'assignments' block that actually links to all the units and assignments within them. It's an overview spot that organizes the entire class and students can see all the most important information they need in one place when they log in. THAT is what Teams needs. Desperately.
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Anonymous
commented
I'm a parent. Took way longer than it should have to figure out how to join a class in progress. Should just be a "Next class begins at..." Or "Join class in session" button. I've had to talk several others through the process of actually finding the teacher teaching and it just shouldn't be that hard. Calendar vs. planner?
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Leslie Farquhar
commented
I created a Bitmoji classroom that I want to make the default page, so when my students log into Teams they get a nice warm welcome instead of computer form-type page. Really want the option for the user to decide which page is the default page.
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Anonymous
commented
I use the class notebook as the "landing page" for students and will just have to train students to ignore the posts tab and go there first. This is because the landing page needs to have static information - announcements, the daily lesson, resources, contact information, a calendar, and an assignment schedule - and the posts tab is just not meant for that. So why can't we just be allowed to reorder the default tabs? Why are they stuck in the order they're in? If we could just move them ourselves, we could create our own dashboard in whatever tab we want.