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....

That was one of the reasons why DD didn’t get a Mac but a normal laptop last Summer, we anticipated this issue.

Teams work great for her, having live lessons is a lot better than the work during the first lockdown where she had hardly any contact and it took days to sort out problems she had with her assigned work.

I've been using Teams on both pc and iPad since last March with no problems (fingers crossed!).

I hate Teams.

From an accessibility point of view (I need captions), Google Meet is much better. Zoom is better for video and audio quality although does not do automatic captioning (someone needs to type them).

Teams is utter shite regarding accessibility.

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?
Because last time parents angrily demanded live lessons. Then when they provide that they have people angrily demanding emailed worksheets instead

We are having problems, my daughter keeps being assigned as a guest despite logging in using her invite email. She then can't join the chat function so is getting despondent. I've emailed her tutor. She is in year 10 and is not engaging with online work at all right now.

If you have a mix of supports used and you need that feature not so much

There are some features not available to Mac but none that I've ever found a blocker to multi team/multi site work including presenting seminars and interactive.

The bigger challenge is trying to work across multiple uncontrolled participant laptops - not something schools can control and equally a problem for any collaboration software.

Teams is a huge big pile of steaming horse poo. I have no idea what the appeal of it is. I use it, but bloody hell I really don't like it.

My school started using Teams in Lockdown 1. In the Autumn term we went hard on making sure all students knew how to access it, submit work in the right place etc and we've had continuous weekly training on it with emphasis on uniformity of approach. My dd's school have just started using it and the inexperience of the staff is obvious in what they are asking if the kids and the variety of was they've set the work. I do think all schools should have put serious effort into planning for this before it happened again. I get frustrated when dd's teachers don't set the work as an assignment, just scrappy instructions as a post in the Team, or within the live lesson that wasn't recorded so I can't go back and find out what she needs to do.
When it is set up properly and users are trained adequately it's genuinely brilliant and additional apps like OneNote, forms, One Drive etc all tie in to make it pretty easy. I'm not a tech fan, I'd be perfectly happy with my whiteboard pen and worksheets but it's here and I've seen some students engage much more thoroughly using this than in the past.

My dc's school uses Teams to send out a weekly pdf and post some live lessons. They don't use the Teams calendar to add the lesson link to, so you have to find it from the activity feed. They ask for work to be emailed to them rather than submitted by Teams, so they don't benefit from having all the work and feedback in one place. And they sometimes set up a new Team for each week's work and sometimes use the generic one.

Luckily I only have once DC at the school, for parents with multiple children trying to find where and what the work is and when the Iive lessons are, it's very difficult.

From a teachers POV.
Our SLT have really ran with Teams, we've had lots of training on it. So... we're going with it regardless!! Some elements are good, some things easier to find than others. You can upload word and PPT documents which is better than other platforms. But, yep it's a pain!

It’s really tough working and trying to support your DC but in your attitude towards the school and teachers YABVU. There was free support for schools to use Teams or Google on the tech side, but no actual practical training on how to use them as a substitute for being in class. Schools have to cater for every conceivable device and browser and a totally moveable feast in terms of how many children in school and how many at home. Plus teachers juggling their own DCs, self isolation and illness.

Instead of listening to advice and deciding on partial closure before the holidays, the government sent primaries back for a day and teachers learned at 8pm that day, along with the rest of the nation, that schools were ‘closing’ immediately.

Why didn’t schools foresee this and use the autumn term to prepare? Partly because it is pretty full on in any normal term, just teaching. This year, there was massive additional work to understand where children were, what they’d remembered, what needed to be retaught etc. Many more interventions needed, eating into any bits of time that might have been available. Plus, with the DFE’s record of rapid nonsensical changes, who would have wanted to invest time in something that might be ruled unallowable?

And then, to back up his stupid ‘complain to Ofsted’ statement, Gavin has had to get his poor civil servants to make up some frankly ludicrous ‘expectations’ of how many hours remote provision different age children will have.

I would just be very grateful any teacher is still doing their best for your child because they have been treated appallingly and at times the DFE has actively prevented them from doing the right thing for children’s education and well being.

I really like Teams. Sending emails would be unnecessarily complicated and how would they do live lessons without teams? The problem is probably your computer.

I use it without issue. Are you using the right browser?
Much safer than Zoom IMO.

I’m struggling too! I’m not the best with technology but the documents don’t seem to load so they my dd can write on there and add the answers on, I’ve opened it in office (the only thing it will let me open it in) and it still doesn’t let you edit the page. Is wine with lunch on today

Agree, it's awful. We have to use it for work. I hate it.

So, a piece of software that enables live interaction thru' video, audio and msgs, sharing of documents both interactively and as a repository, and from all parties in the 'team', that is used by teachers, business, social care, NHS and many more with all their wildly different particular needs both in terms of business type and as individuals within them, across two extremely different OS types, windows and mac, with all the different hardwar configurations and capabilities, with all the different IT systems and configurations used by businesses, to enable functionality that is both simple and complex depending on the needs and IT knowledge of individual users, all at an unprecedented time of demand and usage... I think it works pretty bloody well.

Yes it will have days when things fail, usually when demand ramps up fairly suddenly, yes it has a learning curve, but then what doesn't? Yes, it's dependent on users making it work for each other.

But without Teams, EFH and WFH through this pandemic would have been a whole lot harder, and ineffective.

Loving googleclassroom. Seems pretty straight forward

And - I really don't know how - they have added various URLs for site to provide extra information, or quizzes on related topics or youtube videos to find information to then write about. But managed to add them as photos, rather than clickable links. So we have to type out long website addresses making sure not to make a typo to find the site they wanted to direct us to.
So frustrating!
I know that is not the platform fault and the staff were up against it to provide learning, but it just makes it that little bit harder for kids and parents who are struggling too.

I agree that it is an over complicated way of setting class work. The shared online classes and calendar would be ok but the rest of the programme is all over the place and confusing.

Our secondary school is using about 6 different packages for different subjects and don't seem to realise that this is confusing and difficult for parents.

I love Teams and have been using it since lockdown 1

But me and Google classrooms do not get on - clueless finding ds' work

Horses for courses I guess

I've just realised I didn't have Teams open today!

It's much better than email alone for projects and means you can have work chat without it being on email. Plus I can call colleagues without a phone of any sort - we're tending to video call in Teams as a replacement for face-to-face in person conversations.

The issues are probably down to lack of training. There are free MS tutorials online which might be helpful.

Four of us (me and three DC) are using it simultaneously right now! No issues at all.

Yeah, we have Teams at work and it's crap. Glitches every five minutes.

You think Teams is bad? Our primary school uses Google Classroom which is the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever had the misfortune to try and use.

Because last time parents angrily demanded live lessons. Then when they provide that they have people angrily demanding emailed worksheets instead

We don't get live lessons either way. School just use Teams to provide recorded video welcomes and assignments - no live lessons.

Also to those saying I have a bad attitude, I have not complained or demanded anything. I am sorry for teachers. I did send an email saying it would be much easier for us if they would provide one simple document containing all the work for that day or week, ideally by email, but I did not have a go at the teachers. I don't blame teachers for this and I'm sorry for them too.

I think some teachers have a bad attitude to parents, and vice versa of course, but generally we're all doing our best. I do however think that this could be done in ways that involve less time-wasting and effort for everyone.