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Teams Junior - Microsoft Teams is amazing but it is complicated for younger children to use a simplified version

Teams Junior - Microsoft Teams for EYFS/KS1 would be amazing! with a more user friendly interface for our youngest learners.

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Sophie Lamb shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

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  • Mike commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Simpler configuration tools for schools' infrastructure staff

    The Teams UI seemed to offer a seven-year-old student, the capacity to admit meeting attendees from the 'waiting room', and to 'share screen' [presumably with the rest of the meeting]. For these several weeks, the seven-year-old 'played fair', and might even have been helpful in admitting other students while the teacher was teaching. But I doubt it was intended to assign this level of permission or responsibility.

    I imagine this arose from an inappropriately limited collection of configuration templates, for schools IT admin staff to select from. I imagine IT admin staff cannot see users bundled into collections like 'class Tiger', 'Tiger teacher', 'Tiger student', and to assign common privilege sets from templates to those groups as a whole.

    Schools IT admin staff are not like business IT admin staff. They have to be approachable to students. They have to help confused teachers. They often are a single individual, without team-mates to turn to for help, whose skill-level is closer to 'power-user' than to 'infrastructure professional'. This is no slur. In my experience, they can be very poorly paid; expected to operate nearly as a community service.

  • Mike commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Less to 'fiddle' with

    In recent days, I have watched as a seven-year-old spent an entire 'with the teacher' video session, seeing which bits of the Teams UI they could click. The ready availability of pointless distractions seemed a bit of a self-created failure to me. You might counter-argue that if they were removed, then the children would only find others, elsewhere in Windows. And you might be right. In particular, the availabilty of roller-skating dinosaurs, purple dragons, and other exciting cartoon images to drop into meeting chat was a source of endless distraction for many of the children in a session.

    Pity the teacher you has to decide whether to interrupt the teaching to discipline an unruly rabble, relentlessly messaging pretty pictures to one another, or get on with the teaching, for those willing to attend to it.

  • Mike commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    A 'parent' interface.

    When a primary-aged school child wants to continue using their computer for play after schooling, it limits the time available to parents to consume their Teams account to keep track of whether their assignments have been done adequately and handed in. The workflow for scanning work set electronically, printed and filled in by hand is very clumsy: I scan it at my PC, email the scan to the chid's PC, log in (as them) to reach their Teams account, open their mail, retrieve the scan, upload to the assignment. After too many times going to bed too late, I gave up handing their work in.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Seriously, we need this!!!! The younger learners and nonreaders are struggling so much with navigating through Teams.

  • Andy Duffy commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I completely agree with this. If Teams is going to be used across the different year groups, it needs to have a simpler interface for younger users. We are a small MAT of 5 schools and are struggling to encourage our Primary schools to use O365 over GSuite and Google Classroom. You are not going to succeed in making this area unless you cater for this group of users too.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I need my third graders to be able to create an array on a quiz that does not change into groups. I also need them to be able to use a division symbol that they can find easily.

  • Lucia Sanchez commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    There was a 2020 Hackathon project (It takes a village...) that had some suggestions with regards to this

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    YES!!!!! This would be amazing! We are using it with first graders, and while we have had success, parents are having to do so much for the kids. They are not quite ready or able to figure teams out on their own.

  • Lisa commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I support this EXCELLENT suggestion!!
    Hats off to early childhood educators!!

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    So true! Teams was built for business, and its adaptation for use in education has been clunky. It is really difficult to use with elementary students, but my district is Seattle is forcing us to. Many of the features in Teams are not applicable to a K-5 class, and in fact hamper usability and get in the way of easy, efficient usage by teachers and students. Meanwhile, there are features we K-5 teachers really need.
    Please make a "Teacher Teams" or "Teams Jr"!

  • Veronica commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Yes! More simple layout, very clear buttons with recognizable symbols, and fewer clicks to get to an end goal.

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