AFTER many months of COVID-19 and the strict efforts taken by governments to reduce the wide spread of the disease, educators and students continue trying to adapt to the realities of remote and hybrid learning. In an effort to improve digital tools available to schools, Microsoft compiled teacher findings on what has been working, what challenges persist, and what they expect during this school year.

Here is what nearly 500 educators and institutional leaders around the world shared:

• 50 per cent said, “keeping students engaged digitally” and “student participation”, are the top challenges they faced during remote learning.

• 87 per cent of educators said they expect to use technology more than before once in-classroom teaching resumes.

• For institutional leaders, one of their biggest challenges in the shift to remote learning was ensuring staff readiness and building educators’ confidence for remote teaching.

In their quest to keep students engaged in remote learning, teachers are also pivoting to game-based learning to help maintain attention spans, create a sense of community, and express creativity.

Teachers are requiring a central hub of digital tools for remote learning to ensure strong student engagement and to maintain secure digital classrooms. Hence, over 150 million students, faculty, institutional leaders, and teachers have been actively using Microsoft Teams for Education as a hub to engage students in this new reality.

In order to meet the needs of educators and students around the world, Teams for Education has improved its new features leading up to this school year:

• Classes can be up to 49 participants and users can upload custom backgrounds.

• Virtual breakout rooms are now available for students to meet and collaborate in small groups.

• Students can raise their hands virtually during class meetings.

• Educators can view attendance reports and class insights.

• A breakdown using intelligent data analytics is now available that explains how students are engaging with class meetings, assignments and more.

Microsoft is committed to continue delivering efficient remote learning tools, with new features and upgrades, to improve connections between educators and parents/caregivers.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more.