Microsoft Teams

Overview of Teams

Cre­ate and sched­ule online class meet­ings, man­age set­tings and con­trols, and assign meet­ing roles. Sched­ul­ing a meet­ing gives you the abil­i­ty to adjust meet­ing set­tings before any­one joins.

*NOTE: Meet Now meet­ings do not have Break­out Rooms avail­able.

You can set up either a sin­gle meet­ing or a series of recur­ring meet­ings. For online class­es, we rec­om­mend mak­ing your meet­ing a series, as this gen­er­ates a sin­gle link that you can share in your course out­line and in your Bright­space course, mak­ing it easy for stu­dents to access.

  1. Open your Out­look cal­en­dar. *NOTE: This can also be done in the Teams app cal­en­dar.
  2. Click Teams Meet­ing in the menu and select Class. Class meet­ings by default have chat enabled only dur­ing meet­ings. Stu­dents can still view the chat his­to­ry, but they can­not post to it out­side of class time.
  3. Add a Title and click Make Recur­ring to set the meet­ing’s time, date and recur­rence.
  4. *Option­al: Invite stu­dents as Required Atten­dees if you want to pre­as­sign them to pre-cre­at­ed break­out rooms.
  5. Click to close and save. *Option­al: click Send if you’re invit­ing stu­dents as required atten­dees.
  6. Click on the meet­ing in your cal­en­dar to copy the link or edit Meet­ing Options.
  7. Paste the link in your Course Out­line and in your Bright­space course.

Options for Class Meetings

When you select the Class Meet­ing option dur­ing the sched­ul­ing process the fol­low­ing set­tings are pre-set. You can choose to adjust these set­tings from Meet­ing Options at any time.

  • Only Orga­niz­er & Co-orga­niz­er can present.
  • Chat is avail­able in-meet­ing only (vs. Lec­ture meet­ings or Events where chat is avail­able before and after the meet­ing) *NOTE: Stu­dents can still view the meet­ing chat, they just can’t post to it.
  • The lob­by is enabled with only Orga­niz­er & Co-orga­niz­er able to bypass it. *NOTE: We rec­om­mend chang­ing this to allow only peo­ple with­in orga­ni­za­tion to join which enables stu­dents who have signed in to join with­out wait­ing.

To edit Meet­ing Options click on the meet­ing to open and then click on the cog wheel. The Meet­ing options win­dow will pop up, and you can cus­tomize meet­ing options like who can bypass the lob­by, who an present, what roles par­tic­i­pants are assigned, etc.

Meeting Controls

See the chart below to see what var­i­ous set­tings and con­trols do in Teams.

Teams Icon

What it does

Click on the micro­phone icon to mute or unmute your micro­phone. Click the small arrow to the right of the icon to access your sound set­tings.

Click on the cam­era icon to turn your cam­era on or off. Click on the small arrow to the right of the icon to access your cam­era set­tings.

Opens the par­tic­i­pants pane where you can see and man­age the peo­ple in your meet­ing. Click on the par­tic­i­pan­t’s name and select Make Pre­sen­ter to grant shar­ing per­mis­sions.

Opens the meet­ing chat. Two key dif­fer­ences to know about chat in Teams are that chat can be viewed out­side the meet­ing by any­one who was in the meet­ing and has a Teams account, and that all mes­sages in the Teams chat are vis­i­ble to every­one in the meet­ing. To pri­vate­ly mes­sage some­one in Teams you must open a chat with them sep­a­rate­ly from the meet­ing chat.

Allows you to access the options for shar­ing your screen or cloud-host­ed files with every­one in the meet­ing.

Click More to access the record func­tion. In Teams you can choose to cap­ture only a writ­ten tran­script or to record the video and audio of the meet­ing. You can also tog­gle dis­play of auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed cap­tions from here. Any­one in Teams can turn on cap­tions for them­selves.

Allows you to access apps like Polls where you can cre­ate and launch polls and quizzes in your meet­ing.

Atten­dees can use emo­jis to give a quick reac­tion dur­ing the meet­ing. You will see the emo­jis dis­played over their tile in the gallery view.

Share an inter­ac­tive white­board for in-meet­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion. *NOTE: Microsoft White­board is only avail­able for peo­ple who are logged in to a NIC Teams account. If you are work­ing with exter­nal guests you will want to use a dif­fer­ent method for col­lab­o­ra­tion.

Cre­ate and man­age break­out rooms.

Adjust what you see in the meet­ing. Indi­vid­ual atten­dees can adjust their view to some­thing dif­fer­ent than what the orga­niz­er chose if desired.

Click Leave to leave the meet­ing or click the arrow on the right end of the but­ton and choose End Meet­ing to end the meet­ing for every­one.

Meeting Roles

In Teams the per­son who sched­ules the meet­ing is the Orga­niz­er. You can add Co-orga­niz­ers to assist with man­ag­ing the meet­ing.

Orga­niz­ers and Co-orga­niz­ers can:

  • Man­age meet­ing atten­dees, includ­ing pro­mot­ing and demot­ing pre­sen­ters, mut­ing micro­phones and cam­eras
  • Man­age break­out rooms and oth­er meet­ing options

There is also a Pre­sen­ter and an Attendee role. Pre­sen­ter is a default role for every­one in a teams meet­ing unless you edit your meet­ing set­tings. How­ev­er, in Class meet­ings the default is set to add every­one as Atten­dees.

Pre­sen­ters can:

  • Mute the micro­phone and turn off the cam­era of oth­er pre­sen­ters and atten­dees
  • Promote/demote atten­dees and pre­sen­ters
  • Pre­sen­ters with accounts can admit users from the Lob­by for the meet­ing

See the chart below to see what per­mis­sions the indi­vid­ual roles have.

Orga­niz­erPre­sen­terAttendee
Speak and share videoxxx
Par­tic­i­pate in meet­ing chatxxx
Share screenx 
Pri­vate­ly view a Pow­er­Point file shared by some­one elsexxx
Take con­trol of some­one else’s Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tionxx 
Mute oth­er par­tic­i­pantsxx 
Pre­vent atten­dees from unmut­ing them­selvesxx 
Remove par­tic­i­pantsxx 
Admit peo­ple from the lob­byxx 
Change the roles of oth­er par­tic­i­pantsxx 
Start or stop record­ingxx 
Start or stop live tran­scrip­tionxx 
Man­age break­out roomsx  
Change meet­ing optionsx  

Additional Resources

If you’re look­ing to dive right into learn­ing more, Microsoft offers a range of train­ing resources includ­ing video tuto­ri­als and doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Teaching in Teams

See the accor­dion below to learn more about Teams fea­tures that can be used for instruc­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion (Chat, Screen Shar­ing, White­board, Break­out Rooms).

Main Chat

Meet­ing atten­dees, pre­sen­ters and orga­niz­ers can use the Chat in a meet­ing to send mes­sages to every­one. There is no option for pri­vate mes­sages with­in the meet­ing chat in Teams. All mes­sages in chat will be vis­i­ble to every­one in the chat. *NOTE: Class meet­ings by default have chat enabled only dur­ing meet­ings. Stu­dents can still view the chat his­to­ry, but they can­not post to it out­side of class time.

  1. Click on the Chat but­ton in the meet­ing con­trol bar to open the chat pane.
  2. Type your mes­sage in the box pro­vid­ed and press enter or click the send but­ton to share it with every­one in the meet­ing. You can also use the but­tons below the text area to access for­mat­ting, attach a file and more.

*NOTE: Only peo­ple on the NIC Teams license can upload files or access files uploaded by oth­ers. If you have a guest speak­er or exter­nal per­son who will be join­ing your class ses­sions, con­sid­er using email or a shared fold­er in One Dri­ve rather than the Teams meet­ing chat to share files with that per­son. You will need to gen­er­ate a link that is vis­i­ble to “Any­one” in order to share a file link in Teams chat and have exter­nal peo­ple see it.

Q&A Chat

In the meet­ing options, you have the abil­i­ty to enable a sec­ond chat stream called Q&A. The Q&A fea­ture keeps par­tic­i­pant ques­tions orga­nized in a sep­a­rate space from the main chat, mak­ing it eas­i­er for pre­sen­ters to track and respond to them. To enable this fea­ture tog­gle it on in the Meet­ing Options.

Microsoft Teams offers sev­er­al ways to share con­tent with meet­ing par­tic­i­pants. Some fea­tures are tied to a user’s NIC account and may not be avail­able to guests or exter­nal par­tic­i­pants who join with­out sign­ing in. This can affect what guest speak­ers or oth­er exter­nal atten­dees are able to access dur­ing a ses­sion. If you have ques­tions about invit­ing guest speak­ers or work­ing with exter­nal par­tic­i­pants, please sub­mit a Ser­vice Desk Request to CTLI.

  1. Click Share.
  2. Choose a Pre­sen­ter Mode. *NOTE: The default is con­tent only but you can also choose between three options to show your video tile along with your shared con­tent.
  3. Select the screen you want to share to share every­thing hap­pen­ing on that screen. To share a spe­cif­ic win­dow, click the image under the Win­dows head­ing and then click on the win­dow you want to share.
  4. When you are done shar­ing click End Share

Pow­er­Point Live allows you to upload a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion into Teams to cre­ate a more inter­ac­tive pre­sen­ta­tion mode for you and your stu­dents. When you present using Pow­er­Point live, you see the Pre­sen­ter View in Pow­er­Point which includes any notes you have added to your slide and Pow­er­Point anno­ta­tion options.

Atten­dees view­ing a Pow­er­Point Live slide deck have addi­tion­al con­trols avail­able to them includ­ing the abil­i­ty to nav­i­gate through slides at their own pace, to con­vert slides to high con­trast to improve acces­si­bil­i­ty, and to trans­late the slides to anoth­er lan­guage. If an attendee moves to a dif­fer­ent slide than what you are pre­sent­ing they will see a Sync to Pre­sen­ter but­ton which jumps them to the slide you’re cur­rent­ly shar­ing.

  1. Click on Share.
  2. Select a Pow­er­Point from those list­ed or scroll down to Browse OneDrive or Browse My Com­put­er and find your pre­sen­ta­tion where it is saved on your com­put­er or OneDrive.
  3. You will see pre­sen­ter mode of your Pow­er­Point includ­ing built in Pow­er­Point anno­ta­tion options such as the laser point­er, a mark­er and a high­lighter as well as any notes you have added to your slides. *NOTE: Atten­dees will only see the shared slide and any anno­ta­tions you add, they will not see your notes.
  4. When you are done, click Stop Shar­ing

When shar­ing a video in Microsoft Teams, you can use Share screen to play videos from a web­site or a Bright­space course, just make sure to enable Include sound for clear audio.

For a smoother expe­ri­ence, con­sid­er embed­ding videos in Microsoft Pow­er­Point and pre­sent­ing with Pow­er­Point Live, which allows you to orga­nize and play videos sequen­tial­ly like a playlist.

Fol­low the steps below to embed a video on a Pow­er­Point slide

  1. Go to the slide where you want the video.
  2. Select the Insert tab.
  3. Click Video and choose This Device (for a file) or Online Video (for a web link).
  1. Select your video or paste the URL, then click Insert.
  2. Resize and posi­tion the video on the slide as need­ed.
  3. Use the Play­back tab to set how it starts (e.g., On Click or Auto­mat­i­cal­ly) and adjust set­tings like trim­ming or vol­ume.
  1. Hov­er over the You’re Shar­ing Your Screen text at the top of your screen.
  2. Click Anno­tate on the screen share tool­bar.
  3. Select the anno­ta­tion tool you want from the tool­bar that appears.
  4. When you are done shar­ing your screen, click Anno­tate again to tog­gle off anno­ta­tions.

The White­board fea­ture in Microsoft Teams pro­vides a shared dig­i­tal can­vas where par­tic­i­pants can draw, write, and add ideas in real time dur­ing a meet­ing. You can access it by select­ing Share and choos­ing Microsoft White­board from the meet­ing con­trols. You will be prompt­ed to allow every­one to edit or to present the white­board where only you can edit.

White­board includes tools like pens and high­lighters for draw­ing, sticky notes, text box­es, shapes, and tem­plates for activ­i­ties like brain­storm­ing or plan­ning. It also sup­ports real-time col­lab­o­ra­tion, so every­one in the meet­ing can con­tribute at the same time.

You can set up Break­out Rooms in advance of a meet­ing or cre­ate them once the meet­ing begins. If atten­dees are for­mal­ly invit­ed (rather than join­ing via a link), you can also pre-assign them to break­out rooms before the meet­ing starts. For recur­ring meet­ings, the break­out room set­up will per­sist unless it’s changed or delet­ed, so you typ­i­cal­ly only need to con­fig­ure it once.

Remem­ber, the option to cre­ate and pre-assign par­tic­i­pants to Break­out Rooms is only avail­able if you’ve added atten­dees using the email address asso­ci­at­ed with their NIC account when sched­ul­ing the meet­ing. *NOTE: You can only access Break­out Room set­up from Teams, you can­not man­age Break­out Rooms from Out­look.

  1. Go to Teams cal­en­dar and open the meet­ing invite by dou­ble click­ing on it or click once and then select Edit.
  1. Select the 3 dots for More Options > Break­out Rooms from the top menu bar. (This option will only appear after invites have been sent to atten­dees)
  2. Select Cre­ate Rooms.
  3. Choose the num­ber of rooms you want (up to 50) and select Add rooms.
  4. Select Assign par­tic­i­pants.
  5. Choose how par­tic­i­pants are assigned (auto­mat­i­cal­ly, man­u­al­ly, or user’s choice) and select Next.
  6. If you’ve invit­ed atten­dees using their NIC email address, you can pre-assign them to rooms by click­ing Assign par­tic­i­pants. Check the box next to the par­tic­i­pant and choose a room from the drop­down menu and click Save.

You can rename, change set­tings, or delete a room using the three dots on the room card.

When you launch a meet­ing you can imme­di­ate­ly set up Break­out Rooms even if none of your atten­dees have joined yet. You must be join­ing the meet­ing on a com­put­er using the Teams app in order to man­age Break­out Rooms.

  1. Launch the meet­ing by link or by click­ing the Join but­ton.
  2. Click the Rooms but­ton in the meet­ing con­trol bar.
  3. Choose how many rooms you want to cre­ate.
  4. Select whether you want to assign peo­ple Auto­mat­i­cal­ly or Man­u­al­ly.
    *NOTE: Room assign­ment is only auto­mat­ic if you cre­ate the room when par­tic­i­pants are already in the meet­ing. If peo­ple join a meet­ing after you have set up rooms you will need to assign them to a room. 
  5. Click Cre­ate Rooms. It may take a few sec­onds to cre­ate your rooms, once they are cre­at­ed you will see the Break­out Rooms pane with an Assign par­tic­i­pants but­ton along with oth­er con­trols (add a room, send an announce­ment, delete, and set­tings).
  6. If par­tic­i­pants haven’t been auto-assigned, Assign par­tic­i­pants.
  7. Open Rooms when ready.

Once all of your atten­dees are in your meet­ing, you can assign them to break­out rooms. Break­out rooms won’t open until you choose to open them so you can assign mem­bers to their rooms at any time.

  1. Click the Rooms tab on the menu at the top.
  2. Click Assign Par­tic­i­pants.
  3. Choose from the options avail­able:

Bulk Assign
Par­tic­i­pants to Room

  1. Check box next to each per­son you want to assign or check the top box to select every­one
  2. Choose a room from the drop down menu
  3. Click Save

Man­u­al­ly Assign Sin­gle Par­tic­i­pant to Room

  1. Click the drop down for the par­tic­i­pant in the Rooms col­umn
  2. Select room you want to put that per­son in
  3. When you are done con­nect­ing peo­ple to their groups, click Save

Ran­dom­ly Assign Unas­signed
Par­tic­i­pants to Room

  1. Click Shuf­fle
  2. Select Only Unas­signed Peo­ple
  3. Any­one not pre­vi­ous­ly assigned to a room will be ran­dom­ly assigned until all par­tic­i­pants are dis­trib­uted even­ly
  4. Click Save

Ran­dom­ly Assign all Par­tic­i­pants to Room

  1. Click Shuf­fle
  2. Select Every­one
  3. Every­one will be assigned ran­dom­ly to a room, this may or may not be the same room they were in pre­vi­ous­ly
  4. Click Save
  1. Once you have assigned all par­tic­i­pants the Assign Par­tic­i­pants but­ton will be grey and you will see the pur­ple Open but­ton. Click this when you are ready to open the Break­out Rooms

Additional Resources

If you’re look­ing to dive right into learn­ing more, Microsoft offers a range of train­ing resources includ­ing video tuto­ri­als and doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Record Teams Meetings

When teach­ing online in Microsoft Teams, you can use the Record and Tran­scribe fea­ture to cap­ture audio or audio and video of your lec­ture and pro­vide stu­dents with a tran­script. Record­ing ses­sions helps sup­port learn­ing by allow­ing stu­dents to revis­it com­plex con­cepts, review mate­r­i­al at their own pace, and catch any­thing they may have missed in real time. It also improves acces­si­bil­i­ty by giv­ing stu­dents a search­able tran­script they can refer to through­out the course.

Record meet­ings in Microsoft Teams, then upload the record­ing from OneDrive to Kaltura My Media to share with stu­dents. Teams record­ings are avail­able for 120 days before they are auto­mat­i­cal­ly removed, so be sure to down­load and upload them with­in that time­frame.

  1. Start or join the Teams meet­ing. 
  2. In your meet­ing con­trols, select  More actions  > Record and tran­scribe  > Start record­ing.
  3. Select the lan­guage you want Teams to use to cre­ate the tran­script.
    • If you don’t want to record video, you can select More Options and choose an audio-only record­ing.
  4. Select Con­firm. A pop-up mes­sage con­firms the record­ing has start­ed.
  5. To stop the record­ing click More actions  > Record and tran­scribe  > Stop record­ing/Stop Tran­scrip­tion or end the meet­ing. *NOTE: You can also choose to See or Hide Tran­script from this menu.
  6. The record­ing is auto-uploaded to your NIC OneDrive > Record­ings fold­er and a link to the record­ing will be auto­mat­i­cal­ly shared in the Meet­ing chat after the meet­ing is fin­ished.  
  7. Record­ings are avail­able for 120 days before being auto­mat­i­cal­ly delet­ed. To save record­ings longer than 120 days make sure to upload the .mp4 file from your OneDrive to your Kaltura My Media col­lec­tion. See the steps in the accor­dion below for instruc­tions.
  1. Access your Kaltura My Media either through NIC Medi­a­Space or Bright­space
  2. Click Cre­ate. Select Upload.
  3. Choose a file to upload by either click­ing and search­ing or drag­ging & drop­ping.
  4. Enter a Name, Descrip­tion, and Tags (i.e., PNS-101). *NOTE: Tags allow users to eas­i­ly search video col­lec­tions.
  5. Click Save.
  6. If you want to share the video in the course media gallery (Kaltura Media Gallery) for all stu­dents in your course to view, click Pub­lished and select the course you want to pub­lish it to. *NOTE: if you want to pub­lish the video to a course, you first must save it to your col­lec­tion.
  7. Click Save.
  8. If you want to share the link with an indi­vid­ual stu­dent, you must access the video from NIC Medi­a­Space.
    • Login and select My Media from the user menu in the top left.
    • Click on the video you want to share a link to and click Actions > Edit.
    • Click the Pub­lish tab and select Unlist­ed. *NOTE: To pro­vide access to a link the video can­not be pri­vate.
    • Click Save. Click Back to Media Page shown on the top left cor­ner of the screen.
    • Select Share.
    • Copy the Link to Media Page — to paste in an email or on a Bright­space page, Embed — to embed it on a Bright­space page, or Email — to send the link through Out­look.

Additional Resources

If you’re look­ing to dive right into learn­ing more, Microsoft offers a range of train­ing resources includ­ing video tuto­ri­als and doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Using Teams for Virtual Office Hours

It’s rec­om­mend­ed to sched­ule a sep­a­rate recur­ring meet­ing in Microsoft Teams to cre­ate a ded­i­cat­ed link out­side of your reg­u­lar class ses­sion. Keep in mind that the meet­ing chat per­sists, mean­ing any­one who has ever been invit­ed to or par­tic­i­pat­ed in the meet­ing can con­tin­ue to access past mes­sages, shared files, and record­ings.

For this rea­son, avoid post­ing con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ments (such as accom­mo­da­tion let­ters) in the chat. You may want to dis­able the meet­ing chat alto­geth­er and ask stu­dents to share sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion via email instead.

Additional Resources

If you’re look­ing to dive right into learn­ing more, Microsoft offers a range of train­ing resources includ­ing video tuto­ri­als and doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Invite Guest Speakers

To invite a guest speak­er, sim­ply add them to your meet­ing invite as an attendee or share the meet­ing link with them. When using Microsoft Teams, keep in mind that exter­nal par­tic­i­pants will not be able to join break­out rooms.

To sup­port a smoother expe­ri­ence, you may want to assign the guest speak­er the Pre­sen­ter role in advance and enable the Green Room fea­ture. The Green Room cre­ates a pri­vate space where orga­niz­ers and pre­sen­ters, includ­ing exter­nal guests, can join before the meet­ing starts. This allows time to test audio and video, review any final details, and ensure every­thing is ready before admit­ting par­tic­i­pants into the main ses­sion.

Additional Resources

If you’re look­ing to dive right into learn­ing more, Microsoft offers a range of train­ing resources includ­ing video tuto­ri­als and doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Accessibility in Teams

Explore acces­si­bil­i­ty prin­ci­ples and how Teams sup­ports diverse learn­er needs. Teams comes with built in acces­si­bil­i­ty fea­tures includ­ing:

*In order to allow those who rely on a screen read­er to access your Pow­er­Point the pre­sen­ta­tion needs to be acces­si­ble.

Additional Resources

If you’re look­ing to dive right into learn­ing more, Microsoft offers a range of train­ing resources includ­ing video tuto­ri­als and doc­u­men­ta­tion.