​Overview

This page describes the integration between Microsoft Class Teams and school timetables and portals. It describes how and when automatically provisioned Class Teams are created and when teachers and students are given access. 

​Integration with School Portal

From your School Portal, the O365 waffle menu will present staff and students with a range of apps including Teams

In one-to-one contexts, Teams may also be accessed through the Teams desktop application. Users will only need to sign into Teams once using their BCE credentials.

In the Classes web part in the Staff site of the School Portal, teachers can access a direct link to their automatically created Class Team. 

Under My Classes, teachers can expand a class to reveal a series of links related to their class and students.

Note that in the Other Classes section, teachers will similarly find a link to other class teams, however, this link will only open the associated Team if they teacher has already been added as a teacher to Teams.

Links to Class Teams and Class Sites in Staff site of School Portal

Students can similarly access the Class Teams and Sites that they belong to through the classes web part in the Student site of the school portal.

Links to Class Teams and Class Sites in Student site of School Portal

Integration with timetable

There is a Class Team automatically created for every timetabled class. Teachers and students are added to these Teams with the appropriate levels of permissions. Teachers will see these Teams  prior to the beginning of the year (depending on the state of the timetable), however, students won't be added until the beginning of the school year.

Membership of Class Teams is dynamically managed -  if a new student or teacher is added to the class in the timetable, this will be reflected in the associated Class Team.

These Class Teams can be found by clicking on the Teams tab on the left and the user's Teams will be found on the left hand menu.

Teams navigation

Note that these Teams are designed as year-long workspaces. Next year, new Class Teams will be created to reflect the new year's subjects.  BCE will also archive the current year's Teams on the teachers' behalf at the end of the school year. Teachers will be able to access the previous year's Teams to access resources and students will also have read-only access to these Teams as well.

For this reason, a good practice is to create master copies of resources in the School Portal so that the school also retains these resources. This is particularly true of course content created in Class Notebooks. 

​Access to next year's Class Teams

Class Teams are all generated based on the timetables being finalised and imported to eMinerva. BCE start looking for these in late December of the current year. BCE aim to have all of the timetabled Class Team sites created at least 1 week before the start of term.  It will also be reliant on the school uploading the timetable to eMinerva prior to the start of school, allowing enough time for the creation of the Class Teams.

There will also be a slight change to how these Class Teams are activated. As a teacher, your Class Teams will be ready for you to access and prepare your teaching resources, and when ready at the start of the school year you will need to let students into the Team. Here's how it will work:

1. You'll notice a banner at the top of all your new class teams that shows you how many students are waiting to join the class. Navigate to a team and select Activate.