How to join students in the same classroom in Microsoft Teams
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If you use Microsoft Teams as a tool to communicate with your students, you will be interested in knowing one of its latest innovations to use video calls as a new educational scenario.
Holding students' attention in the classroom is a real challenge, and this is even more complicated in a virtual environment. Teachers have to deal with all the distractions of children at home, as well as those that arise online.
Students are one click away from opening Facebook or TikTok and forgetting for a few minutes about History class via video call.To solve these and other problems that arise in this modality of e-learning, Microsoft announced a new dynamic. We tell you how it works below.
This is how Microsoft Teams Together Mode works
This new feature is called Together Mode and uses artificial intelligence to take the image of each participant and place it on a virtual background with the rest of his classmates, which can represent, for example, a classroom, a library, a cafeteria, etc.
So forget about seeing the other attendees in tile view, as all video call participants will be "sitting together"as if they were in a virtual room. You can see the different possibilities that this function offers in the Microsoft video:
So if you're on a study video call, you'll be able to see all your classmates together more naturally than a square view. And of course, this dynamic will lend itself to many games.
This function will not only serve to keep the students' attention, but it will also make it easier to interact with them and see their expressions or reactions that manifest as the teaching develops. This feature is not available yet, but will begin rolling out starting in August.
In the initial release, only one virtual room that mimics an auditorium will be supported, and will support adding up to 49 participants.
Other Microsoft Teams news for video calls
Microsoft has also announced a series of new features that will make it easier to communicate during a video call and simplify the way you share content.
For example, Live Reactions will be added, which will allow attendees to make their reactions visible during broadcasts For example, if they make an announcement or give a presentation, participants will be able to send emojis as feedback to show their support, dislike or simply encouragement.
An important aspect within video calls in Microsoft Teams will also be improved: sub titles. In a future update it will also show who is speaking in the sub titles, so that the full information is saved in the transcript.
And if you're one of those who use app quick replies to save time, you'll find it interesting that Microsoft Teams implements suggested replies in chat, taking into account the context of the conversation. On the other hand, an important change introduced by Microsoft is the support of up to 1000 participants per video call.
And if we want to expand the number of people who can attend our broadcast or presentation a little more, we can use the new update that admits up to 20,000 people in broadcast mode assistants.