Creating a Teams link for Online Classes

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is Humber’s official video conferencing tool for online course sessions. Microsoft or MS Teams is designed with robust, professional features suited to environments where sharing, collaboration and accessibility are a must. Used by many employers (91% of Fortune 100 Companies Use Teams), it offers a modern user interface and is available in several devices (desktop/web/mobile/tablet) to meet the needs of your students.

Here are a few MS Teams highlights:

• Real-time collaboration space equipped with robust chat, whiteboard, and breakout room features,
• Powerful content-sharing capabilities for delivering course content such as lectures and presentations, class notes, course documents, and projects or assignments,
• Ready to be integrated with hundreds of EdTech apps to engage your students and personalize their learning experience,
• Conveniently access, manage, and share your class recordings with your students from your Humber OneDrive,
• Equipped with many accessibility tools like real-time closed captioning, live transcripts, and translation.

Learn more about Using Teams for Teaching by following this link to the Innovative Learning website.

 

How do I Create a Teams Link for Online Classes?

There are multiple ways to create a class meeting link for your virtual class sessions:

 

Method 1: Creating a meeting in Outlook (Recommended method)

With this method, your meeting links will be directly integrated into your Microsoft 365 environment within your Outlook and MS Teams app. Here’s how:

Step 1: Log into Outlook with your Humber login credentials.

Step 2: Go to the Calendar and Create a new event.

Step 3: Add a title, date and time to this meeting. Make sure to toggle on Teams meeting and click Save.

Step 4: Join the meeting, click the People tab and select Share invite to copy the meeting link.

Step 5: Share the meeting link with students by adding the meeting link to the Course Content area and Calendar in Blackboard. You can also share the link in an Announcement to the class.

Here’s a step-by-step guide.

 

Method 2: Creating a meeting link in Microsoft Teams

Step 1: Log into Teams with your Humber login credentials.

Step 2: Go to the Calendar and select New Meeting. If you would like, you can select the drop-down menu beside the New Meeting button and select ‘Class‘. This setting will prevent students from being able to start the meeting without you, as well as preventing them from being able to start recordings or edit meeting settings.

Step 3: Add a title, date, time and details to this meeting. If you would like, you can select a recurrence if your classes repeat consistently. Make sure the Online Meeting selection is selected! Click Save.

Step 4: To share the meeting link, go to the initial date of the meeting or class, click on the event, and copy the meeting link that is found in the details of the meeting.

Step 5: Share the meeting link with students by adding the meeting link to the Course Content area and Calendar in Blackboard. You can also share the link in an Announcement to the class.

 

Method 3: Creating a channel in Microsoft Teams

You may create a class Teams channel to provide your students a collaborative space for group discussion and class activities.

Important: Please note that all other course activities including sharing and managing course content, marking assessments, and keeping track of student grades must still occur within Blackboard.

These are the steps to create a class channel in Teams.

Step 1: Log into the Teams app.

Step 2: Click Teams on the left sidebar.

Step 3: Click Join or create a team.

Step 4: Click Create a team.

Step 5: Select Class as the team type and name your team.

Step 6: Skip the Add people step. (Note: You do not manually add each student to your Teams channel.) 

Step 7: Locate your newly created Team on the left sidebar. Click on the three dots and click Get link to team.

Step 8: Copy the link and share with your students. (Note: To join the Team, students will need to download the Teams app and log in using their Humber credentials.)

See Microsoft Teams for Education, Quick Start guide for educators for additional tips and instructions.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions):

Self-directed help

• For a series of short helpful videos refer to Microsoft’s video series Microsoft Teams Video Training.

 

Need support? Contact the Innovative Learning Support Centre. We are here to help!