From the course: Learning Microsoft Teams for Education

Communicate with conversations

- [Instructor] One of the defining features of Microsoft Teams is the conversations feature. Teams is a powerful communication platform which allows you to engage students in discussions, to keep them informed, to give them a place to ask questions and much more. It essentially gives everyone in the class a voice and extends the learning beyond the classroom. Let's take a look at how to use these conversations. So within a team, every channel will have a post tab that allows anyone with permissions to post messages. Here I'm in my general channel and up at the top, you can see that I have a post tab and here, there have been several messages that have already been shared on this board. Now the general channel is typically where the bulk of communication will be done when it's directed towards the entire class. However, you'll see that when I navigate to some of these other channels, for example, project team one, that it has its own post tab up at the top. Now this is really nice because it helps to keep the communication separated and easier for everyone to follow. So it doesn't jumble up that general channel when I'm posting in some of the other channels. Now you'll also notice that in the conversations feature, you have threaded messages which also really helps to organize the conversation. So here for instance, Marsha has a post. And down below, I can see that there have been three replies. I can click to expand that. And the replies are from Marsha, James and Kara. Now, if I wanted to reply to this particular message, I could go and click reply type out my message, hit enter and it will now add that to that conversation. So chronologically it adds it and it compartmentalizes it right inside of this message. Now I could go back and collapse all and tidy up that post tab. Next let's head over to the Biology 101 course that I just created. Here, on the general channel, I'm going to begin a new conversation. So I'll make sure I'm on the post tab. And then down at the bottom, I'll click new conversation. And when I do, check this out. Down below the text box, we have the ability to add files. We can add gifts, stickers. Here, I can integrate apps, things like YouTube, I have other ones of incorporating forms and more. And then on the far left hand side, we have this formatting button and I want to go ahead and click on that and show you what we can see. So from this, you do have the ability to format your messages. You can make them bold, italics, underline, and use the different formatting. But above this, we have some other options. The first is do you want to start a conversation or an announcement? And you can see that it gives it a slightly different look. I'll go ahead here and type in announcement. Project Pitch! I'll put here Project Pitches are due. Now once I have this message in here, I could go ahead if I want and change that color. I could even add an image to it. I'm going to go ahead and just send it. And now it post it to this general channel in my Biology 101 course. So here is that announcement. I'm going to go back down and click on new conversation. And you'll see that we also had that ability to just do a conversation. If I wanted to ask a question or say something in the channel that didn't necessarily need to be a big bold announcement. Now, next to this, you can decide who can reply. So you can decide if everyone can reply or only you and moderators. And after that, you can decide if you want to post it in multiple channels, which can be really convenient. So let's say here that I wanted to post this in my general channel, but I also wanted to post it in my debate group channels. So here I click on posted multiple channels, select channels and I can choose it from any of the teams that I have here but I want to go down to Biology 101 and share that in my debate group channels. I'll click update. And this new message will now also be shared in those channels. Now, another thing that I want to mention that is really important when it comes to conversations is the power of @ mentions. You can use the @ symbol to call attention to a specific person, channel or team which then notifies them that they've been mentioned. Let's say for example, that now I'm just sending a message down here and I want to go ahead and put Project Pitch. So here I typed, does anyone have any questions regarding your Project Pitch? But below this, in the message I want to put something to a specific student. So I'm going to type the @ symbol and you'll see it starts to bring up students from the class. In this case, I'm selecting Adele. And I want to ask Adele, did you receive your copy of the format? So now that I've put the @ symbol and then Adele, it appears like this in the message. Because I did that, Adele will receive a notification, letting her know that she was specifically mentioned within this post. Now, if you also have the feature for calling out channels or teams, you'll also be able to @ mention them. So for example, here, maybe I put @ mention, I'll start typing debate and you can see it allows me to do this to debate group two channel. Here I could put, did you get your questions answered? And now it will send a message to anyone in debate group to notifying them that their group has been called out in this message. Then when I'm done, I'll go down here and click on send. And as you can see it as now sent that in my general channel, and you can see that it also will post that in these debate group channels because I also posted it there. So take advantage of the conversations feature and use it to keep your teams up to date and informed. Empower your students to communicate as well as ask and answer questions.

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