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....

Google classroom, is making me very annoyed.

No problems here DD using it quite happily.

DS uses Google meets which is also great

Dont worry it is usually very reliable, so it is not you. The system was not designed to support the whole nation to work and school, at least it is still working in a patchy kinda way.

It will get better.

We had this issue last week.
Teachers have got round it by uploading at night or over the weekend.

Not had any other issues today though.

I don't know about the schoolwork side of things, but in work I've been helping our service users get into online meetings and Teams seems to cause the most problems for people, while nearly everyone has been ok with Zoom. Which is great as most of our NHS services will only use Teams...

I just don't understand the attraction of sharing things via Teams, Sharepoint, Zoho Survey Monkey, Zoom, Word attachments etc.
FFS just send an email already

dd2 had a maths lesson on it today but it was either glitching in and out or green screen. she couldnt even tell the tutor as they hadnt added her to the chat (not that you could see the chat) or use the mic either

It's ridiculously easy to use, yabu.

Teams is glitching both for school and my work just now. Trying not to stress , making juggling Full time work and home schooling even more stressful :(

Using Teams for work here, on a Mac.

No problems at all - it's actually one of the better MS tools on a Mac, imo.

Yanbu.
I hate teams at work (so do colleagues) and I hate it for home schooling.
My dc's don't have windows laptops (ubuntu) and one of them wants us to re-download teams every time she goes into a new lesson.

It's the emperor's new clothes of apps.

I used Teams on Mac all the time. Its our enterprise collaboration tool for cross team working, client presentations etc. I have no problems with it but like any tool you need to learn how to use it and Teams is not particularly difficult. Its probably the least worst collaboration tool of those available.

Schools can't win at the moment - if they send out document worksheets its "why isn't it in one place, why are they not doing in person learning" and if the run video classes its their fault that they have had to jump onto a collaboration tool usually without training either in the tool or converting physical to virtual classrooms.

@ChristmasAlone

Techie Teens can't make school work work on a Monday morning 🤔

I'm not massively techie, I've used Team the last few years at work, never ran into any kind of problem.

The op uses a MAC, I think that is probably the main issue

we had problems with microphone - a setting which can't be adjusted until you are in the actual meeting, which is hard for a DC to adjust if their parent is not supposed to be there.
Seems to have been resolved now, but school did seem under the impression that DC were not actually doing the lesson simply because the mic wasn't working. Always assume the worst.
And no instructions were given prior to online schooling so we just started the first meeting and muddled along. Obviously we could have found an online video to help, but you don't know what you don't know (until it is too late and the teacher thinks you are watching TV because your mic settings in Teams are conflicting with your system setting)

so we just started the first meeting and muddled along

Same for teachers tbh.

I find it easy but am used to windows, if you have a Mac I guess it would take longer. I’m also not convinced that all teachers can use it in the best way. Technology is great but the problem is that we don’t have the infrastructure to back it up. Many of us struggling with poor broadband connections, they need to roll out the updates much more quickly

I use it for work and not had any issues, my teen is using it for online lessons and again its been fine. Youngest has some zoom sessions with the teacher, again, been easy. I'd be checking the software compatibility and going through trouble shootting OP.

I use Teams for work on a Mac, you need to use the app and not through browser. Have no problems with it at all.

The user experience does depend on how the work has been set up within the Team and that is something teachers should have been supported with over the past 9-10 months, it was new for everyone but councils, LAs have had time now to provide training and support for this.

And finally, there were big problems with Teams this morning as pp have noted.

Hope it gets better for you OP

There’s 3 of us using Teams this morning for work/school/college meetings and live lessons and we haven’t had any problems. I don’t think it’s complicated at all, but maybe some schools are using it more effectively than others. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how smoothly it’s all going. My daughter is having 4 live lessons each day, uploading work, homework being set etc. My daughter thinks it’s great and doesn’t see why she needs to go to school ever again. 🤣

@C8H10N4O2

I used Teams on Mac all the time. Its our enterprise collaboration tool for cross team working, client presentations etc. I have no problems with it but like any tool you need to learn how to use it and Teams is not particularly difficult. Its probably the least worst collaboration tool of those available.

Schools can't win at the moment - if they send out document worksheets its "why isn't it in one place, why are they not doing in person learning" and if the run video classes its their fault that they have had to jump onto a collaboration tool usually without training either in the tool or converting physical to virtual classrooms.

It’s not my experience at all as a Mac user. There are also some features that arent available on Mac. If all of you are on Mac, that’s probably not an issue. If you have a mix of supports used and you need that feature not so much.

I don't really know what Microsoft teams is tbh. DS has a login to a platform called RMUnify. From there he can access his email, Google Classrooms ( where all work including links to live lessons are accessed via subject areas ), Show myHomework and Google drive which is useful for creating your own homework folders . I think maybe the live lesson links in the Google classroom areas use Microsoft Teams but it just opens and works fine for us

DS still has trouble organising himself despite being 16 but he has ADHD and ASD so that is understandable . It is all reasonably easy to use though and having everything on one platform with one login is great

My laptop hates teams and generally tries to grind to a halt.

make sure you have the most up to date version of microsoft chrome to run it on.

My son has success turning his chromebook on and off when he can't log in.

Teams is far better for finding previous work and organising things than emails, google classroom etc, you just need to get used to it