Teams: Collaboration

To begin collaborating in Microsoft Teams, you will first need to generate a group collaborative space. This is best achieved by creating a group Meeting which then auto-generates a group space that includes video chat, text chat, file sharing and more.

Open up your Outlook calendar

Login to your student email account via the Student Hub.

In the left-hand menu, select Calendar:

Create a new meeting

With Calendar open, you can either select the New Event button or click on your preferred day/time to generate a new Meeting:

Title the Meeting with the name of the project or module you are all working. 

Type in the names or email addresses of the people you want to add to the group.

Select the Teams meeting slider to make this a Teams Meeting.

And hit the Send button.

View the meeting

This Meeting will now appear in your Outlook calendar and the others in the group will receive an invite to join.

This is what the calendar entry looks like:

Generate your group space

Join your new Teams Meeting from your calendar. You can do this at any time and do not need to wait until the Meeting start time.

Select the Chat icon in the Meeting:

Add a simple comment to the Chat panel that opens on the left of your screen:

This has now generated your Meeting space that you are going to use as your collaborative group space.

You can now Leave the Meeting and return to the main Teams window.

Locating your group space

Back in the main Teams window - select the Chat icon in the left-hand menu:

In your list of available and previous Chats, you should now see the Chat for your new group: 

Select this Chat and you will see the comment that you left when in the Meeting:

Across the top of this screen, you will see the tools available for you to collaborate with others in your group: 

Collaboration tools

Once you have completed the previous steps, you should be able to see the row of collaboration tools available to you within your group chat:

Chat (and meet)

The Chat window allows you to have a conversation with your group. You can drag files into the Chat window and these will be placed into your shared Files area.

On the right-hand side of the collaborative tools bar is also a button to Join the original meeting. You do not need to create a new meeting everytime you want to get together, simply agree a time and rejoin this one meeting. This will keep all of your files, conversations and notes together in one place.

Files

The Files area allows you to share documents with each other and if they are in a standard Microsoft format, you can usually edit them here too. This means that a group presentation could we worked on by more than one person whilst you are chatting or meeting with live audio and video.

To add files, simply drag them from your computer into the Files window. 

Meeting Notes

During your live meetings, you can assign a scribe who will take notes about what is said. This can be a great tool for recording who is going to do what in a group projects (and by when). This removes any possible confusion about what/who/when as you are all looking at the same set of notes with agreed tasks, people and dates attached. 

Whiteboard

The Whiteboard is just that - it works like a big whiteboard in a classroom (except it can be endless in size) and allows you to sketch diagrams, scribble data, add notes, create mindmaps and generally thrash out ideas in a more visual format.

If you are doing a group presentation, why not draw 12 boxes on the screen to represent your 12 PowerPoint slides and place a rough idea of what is going in each slide (storyboarding).