Office 365 for education got a huge update this month with a huge update to OneNote and other features. Microsoft in an effort to really compete against Google Classrooms has given Office 365 a major update. Microsoft this month really went heavy with the OneNote updates adding support for Learning Management System (LMS) and Student Information System (SIS) assignment. Microsoft added three additional updates to OneNote Classroom Notebook adding Assignment and Grade integration with Edsby, Schoology assignment and grade integration improvements and Skooler assignment and grade improvements.
OneNote added a new reading comprehension and content researcher add-on with this new update. OneNote got the addition of new fun stickers for student and an addition to class notes, students can save a copy of their notebook to their work or personal OneDrive. OneNote got a redesigned for users running Windows 10.
Microsoft Teams is now part of Office 365 for education. The Office 365 Team explains in their blog “Teams helps create safe and engaging classroom environments with rich conversations including text, video, and voice, as well as custom class themes, stickers and emojis. Educators can save time with student class rosters automatically populated from the school’s information system. They can also move effortlessly between planning lessons, creating content and providing feedback with the help of integrated OneNote Class Notebooks, Assignments and Office apps. Lastly, Teams provides a hub for educators and staff to connect with each other outside the classroom (for example, in professional learning communities), all from a single experience within Office 365 for Education.” They go on to explain “Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) now offers enhanced reporting on malicious emails detected and blocked in your organization.”
Office 365 for education added several security updates as part of this month’s rollout. The Office 365 Team explains “Windows Information Protection (WIP) support is expanding beyond Office mobile apps to Office on Windows desktops. WIP helps prevent accidental data leaks while letting your employees maintain control over their personal data. ATP Safe Links policy configurations let you block specific URLs, customize policies for specific people and more. Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery now provides a more streamlined user interface for managing the entire case lifecycle. It also now extracts text from images using optical character recognition.”
Microsoft added and made other features available as part of the update
- Microsoft Forms is available for commercial preview
- Microsoft Stream is available
- MyAnalytics insights Improvements
Microsoft continues to move forward for Office 365 for Education I am interested to see what updates will be released next month.