Cloud-based productivity software such as Office 365 for Education enables collaboration across teams, devices and platforms for a monthly fee per user. But as new features are added to enhance ways in which administrators, faculty and students can engage, or to help IT protect against threats, it’s important to ensure your endpoint devices are equipped to leverage these features.
Enhance Collaboration & Communication
Microsoft Teams is a digital hub that brings conversations, content, and apps together in one place. Educators can create collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, and communicate with school staff – all from a single experience in Office 365 for Education. There's end-to-end assignment management in Teams; this will enable teachers to move quickly and effortlessly from creation and distribution to grading and feedback. In addition, School Data Sync automatically populates classes with student rosters connected to the school’s information system.
OneNote Class Notebooks helps teachers to organize interactive lessons and deliver personalized learning right from Teams. Organize class materials and prepare assignments with handwritten text, web content, even audio and video from your devices. Then, easily collaborate with students and colleagues. When presenting live, you can pinch and zoom areas of the screen you want the audience to focus on. Easily insert media such as screen shots, or add images ad hoc via your mobile phone – in the middle of presenting – to address live questions from the audience.
Microsoft 365 also has some "hidden" features that dramatically improve collaboration, creativity and communication through the use of "inking." Only touchscreen devices with digital pens can leverage such features as sketching and signing documents. But inking features go far beyond this; users can "mark up" documents with feedback and notes for recipients to play them back in the order they were written; highlight and annotate information across multiple documents and web pages; quickly create diagrams; and jot down intelligent notes and reminders via Sticky Notes and Cortana.
Keep Everyone Productive with Devices that Maximize Microsoft 365
If your students and faculty are web conferencing from their devices, then give their experience a major "upgrade" by sourcing devices that have 2MP (1080p) webcams for video and dual array mics with noise-reduction technology to lower background noise and boost comprehension for all participants.
Look for devices with the latest biometric technologies. Fingerprint readers and infrared (IR) cameras allow users to quickly log in without needing to remember passwords, and IT can set up multi-factor authentication (MFA) for increased security.
3 Considerations for the "Perfect" Keyboard
Ultimately the perceived "quality" of a keyboard comes down to a fine balance between key travel, resistance and, sometimes, layout.
- Key travel: How far the keys can be pressed down… bigger is not always better and shorter key travel can be uncomfortable when typing for prolonged periods.
- Resistance: Also known as "feedback," resistance determines how much "feeling" users get from typing.
- Layout: There is no one-size-fits-all layout to a keyboard. Much depends on user familiarity. Focus on logical and easy to understand layout of functional keys for job roles.
