Improve communication: @mention - Office 365 Tutorial

- [Instructor] Microsoft Teams is an excellent tool for communication, whether it's communication with coworkers or students to a specific group, to an individual, or maybe even to a whole class. Teams allows you to host video calls also so you can have meetings, discussions, lectures and more online, allowing learning and collaboration to continue beyond the walls of the school. Let's take a look at some of the ways that Teams can help you improve your communication. The first is the ability to post within Teams. I'm going to enter one of my teams. I'll click on Biology 101. And in here we have several different channels. We have our general channel as well as some debate groups and a study group. Now inside of these channels, you'll notice up at the top that we have a tab for posts. Here we are able to create these posts. I can create conversations or I can create announcements. So I can post it and then it will be posted here in this thread to the entire Biology 101 class in that General tab. They will then have the ability to reply to it. You'll also see that when we're sending stuff we can send attachments or a stream video or other files that we can share with the person we're communicating with. Now in each of these channels there will be a Posts section, and that's nice because it compartmentalizes the conversations that you're having. For instance, group one probably doesn't want to see the conversations that are taking place in debate group two and so on. So it's a nice way to keep these conversations organized. Now another way that you can communicate is through chat. On the left-hand side I'm going to click Chat, and this brings up a different platform that's sort of like text messaging or email where you can communicate with people in real time, you can leave messages, they can reply whenever, and it's a very effective way to communicate. Now over here on the left you'll see that I have several different communication threads going on. Some are to individuals, you'll see here Samuel Perkins, I'm communicating with him, a fellow teacher, Debra, I have a communication with here, and you can see that I even sent a file along with that. Up here though I have one for science staff, and this is a group of several people. So it's Debra and four other people that are included in this. So when I send this, all of them will receive that and that conversation will stay within this thread. So this is a great place to communicate on a safe and secure platform that will keep a record of your entire conversations. Now, finally, I want to point out how to have video meetings on Microsoft Teams, that is a very big use for it. And what you can do is you can do this from several different places. Right now if I'm in a conversation with, say, Samuel Perkins, in the upper right I always have that ability to meet. So say here we are talking about something and it was difficult to discuss in text and we said, "Let's just meet now." I'd go up here, click on this, and it would go ahead and call Samuel Perkins. Now that is a fictitious account so it's going to go to his voicemail. I can do the same thing up here for science staff. I could start that inside of here, and anybody who saw that it was going on within this channel could join that call. I think the best place to create these meetings, however, is within the calendar. So if I go into this calendar, I can first of all, meet now. And one thing I like about that is that I can click on Meet Now. it will open this up, and, hi mom, I can join that meeting, I can turn my camera off, check my microphone, and more. But then what I can do is to invite people. So once I join this meeting nobody else will be able to enter it until I invite people. So up here I can go in and then invite people. Now I'm going to back up out of here and hang up on that meeting because I want to show you another way, and that is to schedule a meeting. This is the best way I think, and it's to schedule it inside of here. I'll click on New Meeting, Schedule meeting, and here let's just put in what it's going to be. So I'll type in the name of the meeting, you can add required attendees, we can put the time for it. So I'm going to say it's here from 11 until 12, it's one hour long. It does not repeat. Here, if it was a lecture that did I could put that it's repeating. I can also add a channel, and in this case, because it's for my biology class, going to type in "Biology" and I want to add the general channel for Biology. So that's who's going to be invited to this meeting. Now the location will be online here, and then I could type in some details for this meeting. When I'm done, I can click Send, and this meeting has now been scheduled and people in that biology class will be notified. To learn more about conducting meetings with Microsoft Teams, check out my course on learning Teams for education where I go more in depth on how to host meetings.