Microsoft Office 365 Groups is an excellent tool for helping to organize, share, distribute and collaborate on information within an organization. Microsoft has recently updated the features of Office 365 Groups to enable multi-domain support, group email and dynamic memberships, to name a few. In today’s blog post, Microsoft’s Office team highlights the benefits that schools and universities have garnered with Office 365 Groups. Here are some of those highlights:
Professional Learning Communities are groups around the world of educators, who come together in their respective communities, to discuss ways to improve student performance, grades and new ways of teaching. With Office 365 Groups, PLC meetings are utilizing its features to help streamline the sharing and collaborating of information, as the blog post shows:
In addition, to the PLC groups use of Office 365 Groups, public schools of Omaha have found great success in using Office 365 Groups to bring together shared ideas, lessons plans and calendars to add more cohesion to their groups, as they expand. In connection with the benefits of using Office 365 Groups for PLC’s, executive director of IMS for Omaha Public Schools district, Rob Dickson, had this to say:
Looking at what Omaha Public Schools’ needs are around Professional Learning, it was important to build around a platform that was consistent with what our teachers and staff use on a daily basis… Too often, educators do absolutely great work within PLCs, yet often, the work is closed or kept in Word documents or paper binders. By using Office 365 Groups, you are able to easily share your information and learning as the work progresses. When a new teacher enters the community, they can easily access all of the work that has been done previously and help build their own learning in that area. In a model where this is not archived, many walk into a building and have to start from scratch
Here are some examples of the Omaha Public School districts use of Office 365 Groups:
Alongside educators and universities utilizing the benefits of Office 365 Groups, students are also using the platform to engage in areas of interest, share related reference material, collaborate on projects and coordinate events to have.
With continued development of features in Office 365 Groups, Microsoft is working to give users great features to help in their organizations and for the sharing of information. These examples can give potential users an idea of the features Office 365 Groups offers and their benefits. For a future update, Microsoft has pointed out new features like Connectors, which allows Office 365 Groups to connect to remote apps, like Facebook or Twitter, guest access, and Planner.
What benefits of Office 365 Groups could work in your school or organization? Let us know in the comments.
