Earlier this morning Microsoft announced a number of updates ahead of Bett London 2024 happening next week – you can see them all here. The complete list makes for some interesting reading and one announcement in particular reflects something I was advocating for when I was still working in the Microsoft Education team a year ago.
Here is the complete list:
2. Teams EDU updates, including AI
3. Loop
5. Reflect
6. OneNote EDU
Reading Coach No Longer Requires Microsoft Teams
The biggest change for me is the new ability to access the (frankly, incredible) Reading Coach outside of Microsoft Teams.
Today, we are announcing Reading Coach as a standalone app that also provides personalized, engaging, consistent, and independent reading fluency practice. It is available for free as a Windows application and a web app to use in the classroom or at home with a Microsoft account.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/education-blog/what-s-new-in-microsoft-edu-bett-2024-edition/ba-p/4032046#coach
In my mind, this is a great move and will likely expand Microsoft’s ability to engage non ‘Microsoft schools’ with this incredible functionality and assist students with their literacy progress. It appears you’ll still need an Entra ID (formerly, AzureAD) but this is a lower bar for a teacher (especially where SSO is configured) compared to needing to learn the interface of Microsoft Teams Assignments. I see the strategy as being quite sound here – expose educators and students to the great functionality of Reading Coach and then pull them through to the wider capabilities in Microsoft Teams for Education. If you’re unfamiliar with Reaching Coach, this may help:
Generative AI Appearing In…. Everything?
Unsurprisingly, Generative AI capability is being added to more and more products by Microsoft and I like the trajectory here with Reading Coach where a student or teacher can build original stories for practicing reading based on some scaffolded prompts of curated characters and settings:
Beyond Reading Coach, Generative AI is being introduced into Teams for Education in new areas, such as dynamically creating Assignment Rubrics and even assignment instructions.
My take on this is proceed with caution initially. An experienced teacher can likely judge whether a rubric accurately reflects the assessment criteria and outcomes they’re seeking from students, but a newer teacher may simply become overly reliant on a GAI created Rubric and inadvertently set inaccurate marking schedules.
These time saving features are even extending to the specific assignment instructions that are being created for an activity. On the surface, this could indeed prove invaluable for educators with the proviso they actually read and validate the generated content and ensure it is accurate and appropriate for their students and the learning outcomes they are teaching towards.
Remember: it’s a COPILOT and not an AUTOPILOT – educators still need to be engaged and reviewing Copilot generated content and not simply relying on the amazing powers of generative AI to be 100% accurate and reliable when it comes to creating assignments for students to work on.
The good news for schools is that educator access to these generative AI features can be controlled by the IT Administrator through the Teams Admin Centre, thus allowing compliance with the School’s AI policy
Microsoft Loop Coming to Education Tenants
One of the other big announcements is the availability of Loop in education tenants in early March 2024. I’ve actually had a number of Higher Education customers asking for this in the last few months and it’s pleasing to see Microsoft respond.
If you’re new to Loop, it’s (just another!) collaboration platform from Microsoft and in my experience it’s the fastest sync engine of anything Microsoft has created in terms of real time collaboration. I’ve worked in Loop components with colleagues all over the world and it’s always been impressively instantaneous. Again, it appears Copilot has been integrated with Loop for further assistance. The three elements of Loop are:
- Loop Components: Portable pieces of content (like tables, checklists, or paragraphs) that sync across all the places they are shared.
- Loop Pages: Flexible canvases in the Loop app where you can bring together people and all your components, links, tasks, and data.
- Loop Workspaces: Shared spaces that allow teachers and students to track everything important to a class project in one place.
Changes to Copilot Availability & Licensing For Education Customers
In Microsoft’s announcement, this was only #4 which surprises me as realistically, this was the biggest change and opportunity for education customers, with the addition of Copilot for Microsoft 365 being added to the price list for education customers. Perhaps the USD$30/u/m price point means most K-12 institutes will not be rushing to sign up, but the fact it’s available and the 300 seat minimum requirement has been removed will certainly mean some Universities and potentially Independent Schools will be curious to give this a try on select users initially.
I’ve previously blogged about some considerations around Copilot in Education and if you’re keen to rush out and buy a few licenses to try in your environment, just remember the warnings around carrying out some data access reviews. This is, of course, good data hygiene that should be carried out anyway but in reality many organisations have this in the ‘too hard’ basket, relying on a poor form of ‘security through obscurity’. With Copilot, nothing will be obscure anymore as I blogged about earlier:
It’s worth noting that Microsoft 365 Copilot combs across your entire universe of data at work, including emails, meetings, chats, documents and more, plus the web. Therefore, it’s worth considering how prepared your organisation is from a data sharing and restriction perspective before simply turning this on and giving it a try.
I predict there will be more than a handful of educational institutes that get burned on the privacy front when Copilot is turned on prematurely and sensitive data is inadvertently surfaced up to unauthorized users.
OneNote – Still No Single Version To Rule Them All
One of the ongoing frustrations for OneNote fans is the continued confusion around which version of the App to use. There is the (now legacy) “OneNote for Windows 10” which is actually my preferred version and a few years back was touted as the future of OneNote and then there is the “OneNote Desktop Version” which is a rebranded and rebooted version of the older OneNote 2016 Win32 app. There are, of course, other versions – the OneNote Web App and versions for MacOS/iPadOS etc but the two Windows versions are the main ones used.
In a clear effort to move users off the OneNote for Windows 10 app, Microsoft is finally improving access to the OneNote Class Notebook toolbar, meaning there is an in-app setting to turn this on in the OneNote Desktop version rather than needing to download a separate plugin.
Confused yet?
I expect most readers who are not avid OneNote fans likely are, and this is the real shame in my view. I’m going to offer a gentle criticism of Microsoft here and point out the obvious: the inability to simplify their product offerings is reducing the adoption of M365 in education customers.
Competitors such as Apple and Google have long ago figured out that “less is more” and compromised on functionality in favour of simplicity. OneNote is my favourite app in M365 by a long way and I use it multiple times every single day across all my devices, but this ongoing situation of two different Windows apps does nothing but confuse end users and annoy IT Administrators that need to deploy/support both versions.
A tough call is required to sunset the OneNote for Windows 10 version quickly, and then proceed with a single version for all users – a OneNote to rule them all.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I see these updates as generally positive and clearly signalling Microsoft’s strategy to deeply embed generative AI functionality into more of their products. This is both exciting and challenging for educators as they learn the capabilities of Copilot, where they can totally rely on it for quickly generating content, and where they need to proceed with more caution and checking.
I am keen to see whether Google/Apple schools will embrace Reading Coach now that it has been provided outside of Microsoft Teams for Education. I certainly expect there will be some that are more willing to experiment with this now and I truly believe it’s a tremendous literacy aid so the more students that can use it can only be a good thing in my view.
Will there be any other big announcements at Bett London 2024 from Microsoft? I would not rule it out, but historically they’ve not made major product announcements there so I would not be holding my breath.
