Getting started with your Class Team

Finding your Class Team 

Once a Class Team for your course has been created for you, you should be automatically notified but you can find it in the Microsoft Teams app. Open Microsoft Teams, and click the Teams icon in the left column. Class Team names are aligned with the Student Information System, Blackboard Learn & Timetabling to ensure consistency for students. Your Class Teams are displayed, along with any other Teams you have joined at Edinburgh. 

1. Your Class Team name will be in the format {course_code} – {course_name}. Do NOT rename your Class Team, this will break the process and will be more confusing for your students. 
2. The first time you open your Team you will see a message that “Your class awaits”

At this point the Team is invisible to your students. You probably want to keep it that way while you get things prepared. Once you activate your Team, your students will receive an email message with a link to access. Do not click Activate until you are ready to respond to students in Team. 

Important notes on the setup of Class Teams 

The Class Team is a shared space for you and your students to interact. Class Teams with students are a little different to the staff only Teams which you might have used before. 

All features of Teams are enabled and visible in the interface, but not all are suitable for use at Edinburgh. You can read more on the limitations on Teams features. 

People are added to a Class Team in one of two roles: Teacher or Student. Teachers have a greater level of access. Students are automatically added to the Team, on the basis of the enrollment data for the course. This saves administrative effort, but it does have two important implications: 

Invite other staff to join 

You may be the team owner, taking responsibility for managing the community and engaging with students. But you might want to invite other staff to join the team too. 

1. Find the name of your Class Team (top left) and click the three dots to pop up the menu. Choose Manage Team. 

2. You’ll see a screen showing the staff and students who are already members. Click Add member. 

3. Make sure you are on the Teachers tab. Type in the email address of your person who you would like to add to the team. This will typically be a colleague at Edinburgh, but you can also add people from an external organization. Click Add. 

4. This person will receive an email saying that they have been added to the Team. They will have access to teacher-only areas within the team. 

Creating Channels  

By default your team has just one Channel, the General channel. With one channel all discussion takes place in here. You may be happy with just the one channel, or you could  create extra channels to organise the discussion. It’s very much up to you to decide what fits with your course.  

Don’t create too many channels, just in case they might be useful. If you have too many channels, it will just fragment the discussion, making channels look like uninviting empty rooms.  You can always add more channels later if needed. 

Note that channels are displayed in alphabetical order. You can’t reorder channels, except for renaming them. 

To create a channel: 

1. Find the name of your team (top left) and click the three dots to pop up the menu. Choose Add Channel. 

2. Type in a name for your channel, and a description of the purpose of the channel. 

3. Leave the Privacy set to Standard 

4. Put a tick in the box next to ‘Automatically show this channel in everyone’s channel list’.  

5. Click Add. 

Make your first post 

1. Click on the General channel and the Posts tab. Click New conversation. 

2. Type in your post.  

Anyone who joins the Team will see posts created before they joined. So don’t make posts in Teams thinking that others will never see them. If you need a private space to just test things out, create a private channel for this, or even a separate team. 

Teams works best when it is a welcoming, vibrant, active community. Think carefully about what you want students to see when they first join the team, and what you want them to do. Consider asking students to complete a small task – even something as simple as introducing themselves to the rest of the class and saying why they are interested in this course. 

For more about engaging with students, see Creating an effective learning community in Teams. 

Activating your Class Team 

Wait until you are ready to interact with students in the team before you activate it. There is no way to deactivate a Class Team. 

1. Within your Class Team, you will see a banner at the top, saying “students are waiting to join”. Click the Activate button. 

2. You will be asked if you are sure. If you are ready, click Activate. 

3. Students will now receive an email with a link to the Team. They may now appear and interacting in the Team at any point. 

Adding a link to your Team from Blackboard 

1. You can now add a link to the Team in Blackboard Learn. Find the name of your Class Team (top left) and click the three dots to open a menu. Click Get link to team. Click Copy. 
2. Paste this link into Blackboard, so students in Blackboard have an easy way to access the Team. 

Adding extra students to your Team 

New students are automatically added to your team when they enrol on the course, even if they enrol late. So it is rare that you would need to manually add a student to a team. One possibility might be if you wanted to add a Student Rep in your school to the team. 

You can only add students to a team after it has been activated. 

1. Find the name of your Class Team (top left) and click the three dots to pop up the menu. Choose Manage Team. 

2. You’ll see a screen showing the staff and students who are already members. Click Add member. 

3. Click the Students tab (if you don’t, you will accidentally add the student to the team with teacher permissions)  

4. Type in the students email address, and click Add. 

5. The student will receive an email saying they have been added to the Team, with a link to access it.