To be SO CROSS about fecking Microsoft Teams? RANT warning!

[HerselfIndoors]

It doesn't work! It's complicated, confusing and all over the place, then when you finally find some actual content from school, an actual assignment for your child to do or video to watch, it doesn't download or open - presumably because the system is overloaded. It's also not designed for Mac users so there's a whole load more dicking about to get that to work (if it's working at all).

I have my own work to do but just like last time, I'm going to be spending hours struggling with this stupid software. WHY don't school just make up a simple word or PDF document with reading and worksheets/assignments for the week, and email it to us? Then we could email back the completed work once a week. I could organise that myself, it doesn't take a genius. Instead everyone - teachers, parents and kids - is spending vast amounts of time trying to use an unnecessarily complex system.

I mean it's not as if losing hours of my work time every day MATTERS, it's only earning a fucking living in a pandemic! Oh and what a great idea to add a layer of extra stress and hassle to the kids' homeschooling day. FFS.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR I'm so pissed off. I emailed school (politely) last time to suggest doing it a simpler way - totally ignored.

Is it just me? It's not that I've done it wrong - both techie ex and techie teen DS cant make it work this morning. But I need to calm down so having a rant here....

Use it for work and love it. Can even blur the background to sort out privacy issues.

Dd1 uses Google class room which I like but dd2&3 have teams which has been fine. I use teams for calls but not documents and that’s fine. Much better on my laptop than my phone though which is a bit annoying.

I teach hundreds of kids. If every one of them were emailing me weekly with massively weighted documents containing pictures of their work (lots take photos of handwritten work) then my emails would fill up pretty quickly.

Last lockdown some preferred email to Teams and it was almost unmanageable. Now I can monitor Teams and note which ones have not accessed or submitted work (a small proportion so far) and contact them appropriately to offer help.

I can also then quickly feedback in one box and send it back. Through email I could not mark work as efficiently and missed the quicker opportunities to address misconceptions in learning that Teams offers.

I am sorry that you are finding it difficult whilst juggling your own work. I am also a parent and understand the time having DC at home at the moment is taking up.

Completely agree, my teen dd was stressing about the fact that she can't edit an assignment set for her.

She has to hand write her answers, photo graph them and then send to her teacher via email 🤯 ridiculous system.

I'm fed up of it. We can never view the videos or access assignments, presumably because everyone is doing so at the same time. I packed it in the other day and we did some baking instead

Re privacy, from what I could see this morning, the teachers had made messages to children with SEN about special work for them, visible to everyone. I think that's pretty terrible.

I’m using Teams for work.
It’s a nightmare if you have a Mac. Couldnt even managed to log in for meetings. And this predates covid too.

I’ve ended up using my teens computer instead because they are on Microsoft rather than Mac....

We've got two children in (state) primary who are both now having a full day timetable of live lessons delivered via Teams and it is working brilliantly. DH and I are able to WFH almost as if they were physically in school. It helps that we have both been using heavily Teams since long before the pandemic so we know our way around it.

It is soul destroying frustrating when things don't work though. I think this is the problem - when it works it is great, but when it doesn't work it is an absolutely nightmare.

One of my students is a Mac user who struggles to open word docs etc so I convert everything to pdf for her. You could email the school to request that files are uploaded as pdfs?

Oh I quite like it

@HerselfIndoors

It's not just Teams itself that is winding me up (though it is!) It's this dumb attitude from schools (and you get the same from government) that everything has to be done with special software, which inevitable takes more time, is harder to do and has much more potential to go wrong. Oh and costs the system more as well.

It's not necessary, and it excludes or discriminates against parents who may struggle with tech or don't have much time because they're working. It adds stress right when we don't need that. It's everything that pisses me right off about the education system.

Yes , just give them an old fashinoned text book. Or a pack of worksheets .

@HerselfIndoors

And I was suggesting returning a simple document once a week containing all the work. Obviously if you are getting hundreds of random emails a day that would be bad, but I'm talking about setting up a regular, simple system for the week's assignments.

Or if not email just use a simple web page that documents can be copied from and to.

What teachers would have the coding skills to do that? At primary level? Or have a server they can access to do that on, that hasn't got three thousand safety "features" set up to safeguard what pupils can access?

Btw my dcs are using Google classroom instead and seem to have few issues with it..

The thing is, as I said before, there is compatibility between Mac and Microsoft. I deal with word files every day in my work - they open in Pages and I save them back to Word for my Microsoft-using colleagues (I'm freelance). It's not that I'm not used to Microsoft - I'm just used to it being automatically compatible. When it's not, that's when you have to spend ages trying to work out what to do.

I've got 2 high school children and 1 primary all using teams on their iPads this morning simultaneously no problem. Mix of live lessons and accessing assignments. And I'm getting on with my work online too.

What teachers would have the coding skills to do that? At primary level?

I suppose what I would really like is something that does what Teams does, but simply and with only one location/page so things are easy to find.

There are online service for exchanging files but I agree that could get complicated too.

However I don't think worksheets is a bad idea. It would be better for all the people who don't have enough tech at home.

@schmockdown

It's bad but not as bad as bloody google classroom which is the most unintuitive, not fit for purpose piece of software that is giving me the fucking rage on a daily basis.

Oh I hear you! Our school has been using Google Classroom since Sept for homework which was fiddly, but this is a whole new level. Plus teachers are having to create digital learning on the hoof and while teaching the 40% of children who are still at school, so we are ending up with stuff pulled together from multiple sources, no standard format, links that don't work etc etc. "Edit the attached document and correct the grammar, punctuation and spelling" - how can we edit a scan of something printed from Twinkl that I can see actual staples in! It's such a waste of time that nobody has spare (sorry already grumpy from starting my own work before 6am).

I think a large part of the problem rests with the decision to close school with no notice and to keep on insisting schools wouldn't shut.
If kids had been trained in school on how to access stuff, where to save things to .... then many of the problems wouldn't have come up.

There is a big difference between techie teens and being able to actually do useful work stuff on a computer.

Especially considering our school puts badly photocopied worksheets and pages from textbooks on teams, for us to download and print, so it's just a roundabout way of getting them...

I'm a Mac household and have had no problems. I use Teams for work and it's being used for school and apart from a couple of glitches re internet access it's been fine. Child's school setup seems to be very good though we were told that investment in training and resources had taken place before Christmas so that may have helped.

I hear Google is a
Similar shit show

Bill Gates and his company does have a habit of a good idea not perfectly executed.

I agree with your alternative and perhaps only use MS Teams for videos if there is not an easy other option for the school.

Mircrosoft teams has gone down several times already this morning.

We used it in the previous lockdown and it was a bit complicated but now we are used to it it's pretty easy.

OK thanks v much for all the replies, I really appreciate the discussion and it has given me a bit of hope and I've calmed down. But I will now get off MN and try to do my work. Will check back later. and good luck to all