Teaching and Learning Stories from the Field, a podcast from the Teaching & Learning Centre at Seneca College Episode 2: Using Microsoft Teams to Increase Engagement and Community in Your Class Transcript Jennifer Peters 0:10
Hello, and welcome to "Teaching and Learning Stories From the Field," a new podcast from the Seneca Teaching & Learning Center. Today we will hear from Jason Dojc and Kirsti Clarida. They will tell the story of how they're using Microsoft Teams in some really unique ways. Kirsti is a graduate of the Seneca College Veterinary Technician Program, the same program she is now proudly coordinating. Over the last 13 years, Kirsti has continued to grow as both a registered veterinary technician and educator. She has lead collaborations with Seneca' School of Fashion Arts and Social Service Worker Program. She also serves as the president of the Ontario Veterinary Technicians Educators Association, and vice president of the Ontario Association of Veterinary Technicians. Jason built his first web site when the World Wide Web was in its toddler years, and he's been living a digital life ever since. Before joining Seneca, the self proclaimed, unaccredited anthropologist worked in marketing agencies helping clients across a broad spectrum of industries understand how digital, social, mobile, and other geeky stuff affects consumer behavior. Now he's training the next generation of marketers to do the same. Hopefully even better. He's incorporated a lot of ed tech into both his in person and virtual classrooms and is always on the lookout for solutions that improve classroom engagement and student learning. So without further ado, here are Jason and Kirsti's stories.

So welcome Jason and Kirsti to "Teaching and Learning Stories from the Field." So excited to hear about your project in MS Teams and how you're using it with your students. Maybe we'll start with Jason. Can you tell us about how you're using Teams with your students?

Jason Dojc 1:48
I'm using Teams primarily for well for two reasons. The first thing is class announcements. It's just the easiest thing I find that I have my phone around me so if I think of something that I think, "ooo, should have told the whole class this," or I'm scrolling and I see something interesting that I want to share, it's just a quick copy and paste and stick it into Teams and away we go. The second big thing that I use Teams for is group work. So I divide the class in groups, and there's the whole class is on one Teams' channel - or one team - and then I give each group their own channel, and that way the group can collaborate, they can talk amongst themselves, they can have team meetings; they can also share documents, most importantly. So they can all collaborate, work literally on the same page, and hold meetings with each other and run their project management out of Teams. So I encouraged them to have their project calendar as well on Teams and keep each other in check.

Jennifer Peters 2:55
Cool. And Kirsti, how are you using Teams with your students?

Kirsti Clarida 2:59
I started using Teams for a virtual program orientation, and I moved all of the content that I would have delivered face-to-face - touring through the building, giving them maps, talking about the ins and outs of the manual - I did it all virtually, and I did it before classes started. So it really engaged me with the new 110 students that were coming to the program. And since then, that's become my central hub to coordinate with them. So they now use Teams with me continued through that virtual orientation, and I have created new Teams or sub channels for each of my program areas, and my courses, and they can ask me specific topic questions, and I'm actually seeing more and more of it being used for the students to answer each other. It's offloading some of those emails that I would get. And when a student poses a question, sometimes even before I can get to it, somebody else has already redirected them back to where the answer was posted originally. So it's, again, it's a communication hub for me.

Jennifer Peters 4:10
And it's kind of like crowdsourcing support.

Kirsti Clarida 4:12
Totally. Totally, yeah.

Jason Dojc 4:15
Students helping students - always the best.

Jennifer Peters 4:17
Yeah, exactly. And what were both of your motivations for using MS Teams?

Jason Dojc 4:24
This actually started long before the pandemic. I had a, I had a project with Seneca - it's actually those virtual tours that you see on the Seneca website - and I was working with students on this. So we met at campus for the very first time and then afterwards, we were, you know, we were trying to figure out okay when are we going to meet and how are we going to do regular meetings, and we realized at that point, you know, I'm living in central Toronto, there was a couple students in Scarborough, one student in Brampton. Why are we meeting at the Seneca@York campus where, in Toronto traffic, can take us up to an hour to get to? This doesn't make any sense. So what we did was, "All right, we're gonna collaborate virtually." Now this was before I knew about that Seneca had - I was a part timer at the time so it was before I knew that Seneca had Teams. So at the time we, you know, we use Slack. We use Slack as our asynchronous communication. So that's how we're going to communicate with each other when we're offline. We'll then have a web-conferencing term - and I'll use neutral terms, rather than actual software names so it becomes a little more universal - but we'll use web-conferencing for our live meetings, we'll have Slack for our asynchronous communication and for sharing files, and we'll make sure that any file we share is collaborative. That means more than one person can use that file at a time. And the project went super smooth. We all saved a ton of time on commuting, and one student actually said to me at the end, he's like, "Is this how work gets done? Like in general?" And I said at the time, "Well, at leading companies, yes."

Jennifer Peters 6:06
And now, with COVID, it's kind of demonstrating that, hey there's a lot of stuff we should be doing this way, I think.

Jason Dojc 6:12
Yeah, COVID has brought everyone like everyone else into the leading edge. It's no longer the leading edge anymore. Now COVID made it all mainstream.

Jennifer Peters 6:22
One of the, one of the things I'm hoping for after COVID is that the telephone meetings with your doctors will still continue and the virtual meetings with your colleagues, but things you don't have to be in the same room with I hope that does continue, because it just makes things so much more flexible and manageable in terms of time management and travel and all that kind of stuff.

Kirsti Clarida 6:42
And accessibility. We would try to have meetings and, I mean, we have a large faculty group, and I could maybe get a third in the same place in the same time with competing agendas. But if they could dial in or remote join, or we could Zoom, our ability to make a meeting time that more people can attend is just skyrocketed. I can now get 50 or 60% of my staff together!

Jason Dojc 7:03
The other big advantage is you can take guest speakers now from anywhere in the world.

Jennifer Peters 7:07
Yes, that is a major thing.

Jason Dojc. 7:09
I had a guest speaker from Germany last semester.

Jennifer Peters 7:13
Wow. I think in the past when that sort of thing was happening, it would be this big production of "oh, I need to get everybody involved, IT services, everybody," but now, with Zoom especially, it's just like, "you know, here's the link and everything should work okay."

Kirsti Clarida 7:32
Yeah, no, it's fantastic.

Jennifer Peters 7:35
And Kirsti what was your motivation for using Teams specifically for the orientation?

Kirsti Clarida 7:39
Well, I had started using other software to try to tackle unique one problems just the way that Jason had to communicate one-on-one. I had actually looked into Slack and I tested that out a little bit and I was using, I was using either Google or shared OneDrive docs to try to have collaborative exercises in a group together. But when the pandemic struck last fall, well I guess it was March, so as was winter term, I had played around with Teams, and I thought, "well, I'm just going to use this right now." So I immediately moved my courses into Teams and I tested it out that way. Being able to host a lecture, answer questions, have engagement from the students, and I really liked it. And I found that the students were engaged, I had high attendance numbers, and the recordings were saved - I didn't have to do anything special to the recordings after to make them visible, unlike a PowerPoint, where you'd have to save it and uploaded it, and transition it. So I liked it. When the summer came around, and we were talking about doing orientation and we didn't even know if we will be able to be on campus again, I knew that I still had students coming and some of the information they needed was really specific to understanding the building and I thought, "well, am I going to get them through the building, how am I going to get them to see all this, how am I going to get them to feel like they're part of the program?" If they can't come to the building and meet me and walk through the program. And then I thought of Teams because I thought it works so well to teach, maybe this will actually pull all of the information together in one place. So I use the Seneca virtual 360 tours, I had extra videos from inside my programming area. I have the building maps, I have flow throughs, and the way that Teams allows us to set the tabs at the top, I could spend time giving that tour experience in an open forum, new students were able to ask me questions, if they were wondering something about our uniform policy, I could show them that link, I directed them to the bookstore. And actually, I'm not even going to lie, I think it's better than any orientation I've ever done. I think that that one-stop hub for the program and bringing it all there and now it's, it's there, they can - doesn't matter that they're in their second or third semester, they'll be able to go back and look at where all these links. It's one, it's just one place, it just worked out really well.

Jennifer Peters 10:04
That's amazing. It's like creating a knowledge base for your course.

Kirsti Clarida 10:07
Totally, yeah. It turned it's almost like we have it was a we have a program website. And that gives information for new applicants and our course flow and our program methods in there, but there's a whole lot of ins and outs to every program that just aren't captured in those one Seneca webpages and this became this became it, it became the place to go if you had any questions about the vet tech program. And so, the features of having students answer each other, building that sense of community. I also - we have a high student number, so students are running, I have more than one section running in the same program at the same time, and traditionally, that would mean that they would never meet, they would never talk, they could never collaborate because in Blackboard, they're divided, and I can't join one classroom to another the same way. But in Teams, that's not a problem. So now I can actually have 100 people looking at the same question and putting all of their ideas together instead of just 50 here and 50 there, or three groups of 20 or four groups of 20. It's really, it's really opened up a lot of opportunity for us.

Jennifer Peters 11:10
And Jason, do you do that with your students as well, where you combine sections so that each can talk to each other?

Jason Dojc 11:17
Absolutely. So, in one of the programs I teach, we have all the students in the program are on one team. And then, because our project was across different classes, we could have all the groups together in one Team. And they were able to - they could talk to any of the professors. So all the professors in the program could communicate back with the students on all on one Team. So it was great in that it enabled not just student-to-student and cross-section, but it also allowed all the professors to talk to each other as well.

Jennifer Peters 11:50
Yeah, that's so important especially right now where you can't just run into people in the coffee line.

Jason Dojc 11:56
Yeah, that spontaneous collaboration, it doesn't happen. Yeah, that's the one I mean that's the big thing that I miss from COVID is we don't have that spontaneous office conversation or that conversation at Tim Hortons. But now we can talk, at least with Teams, it sort of brings some of that back. Basically acts like text messaging. So I have it in my phone, and it means I'm actually a little bit more accessible. And I kind of prefer it that way because I never know where I'm going to be. I don't - I'm not the type of person who I need to - all my work communication is going to happen at this one time and I'm just going to go to my computer and answer and I prefer to just have it on like fire off something right away and then it's done. So that's the other great thing about Teams, it's like a second text messages, but it's I know that when it's a Teamss message, it's a work text message, so that way I separate my work and personal life in my phone.

Jennifer Peters 12:49
And you can manage the notifications, too, right, if you don't want to be notified over the weekend or at night, things like that you can manage that easily I would think.

Jason Dojc 12:57
Exactly.

Jennifer Peters 13:01
So I'm guessing that the students are loving this kind of thing or any feedback from students?

Kirsti Clarida 13:09
I, my students really seem to enjoy it. I'm noticing that they're enjoying the community with each other as well. Some of the chats, I've learned, this is one of my, my new learning is that I've created a general channel just for general chatter, so that if students are looking for study or content to study from, they're not posting chatter in a channel that was meant for curricular content. And they are sharing pictures of their notes, they're sharing study sheets that they've done, they're sharing information about themselves with each other and they're, they're just enjoying that. And then I also feel like the ability for students to be able to answer each other encourages that learning, sometimes, you know, you know if you know it if you can teach it. So if they're answering each other's questions, they're reinforcing that they understand their content and themselves, and the fact that they know I can see it, if I don't jump in and change their answer, it just builds their confidence going forward. Because I'll even just put a thumbs up if somebody answered it right, just to let them know, "yeah you got this, nice job."

Arushi Manners 14:21
Reflecting back on how your students are using Teams, is there any particular feature you wish they'd use more of?

Kirsti Clarida 14:30
I do think that they could be collaborating on joint documents a little bit more. And that could be something that I could demo with them a little bit more. I'm not spending a lot of time showing them that feature of Teams. The chat function they're using very very well; it's very natural. I think it's very closely aligned with other messaging services they probably use on our phones anyway. They are really responsive. I can tell very quickly that they are receiving notifications because sometimes it's within moments of me saying something that they are using all those emoji symbols and liking comments as opposed to necessarily mine, but I do think for collaboration, I could probably lean off of what Jason's doing and having them share documents a little bit on each other there.

Jason Dojc 15:17
Yeah, it, for some groups, it's been a bit of a slog. They're so used to using WhatsApp. And so I've had to convince them. I've had to, I've had to say, "when you go to an office setting, and they are on Slack or they're on Teams, you can't just switch and say, 'Okay, I'm going to go off script a bit'." So I want them to use Teams so that they get to get used to how things are done at work. And that took a little bit of, for some groups, there's, there was always a little bit of resistance. But eventually, they all came aboard. I like when you see the groups that are really that are not only doing using the chat a lot, but the ones that are managing their project well, so creating tabs and and setting internal due dates, that's when you know things are really going well for them. In terms of class chat, I don't get a lot of spontaneous chat on Teams. I wish the students would, I wish I could encourage more spontaneous overall class discussion. They'll chat with me one on one, but just having them talk amongst themselves between classes, I wish I could encourage a lot more of that. But what I found has been really successful is, if I have an asynchronous class, and I want them to, they all have to contribute something to Teams, I find that's been really well done really well where they all start chatting and it's a it's a more natural chat than it would be on discussion forums.

Jennifer Peters 16:45
Yeah, the discussion board can be a bit clunky, the one in Blackboard can be a bit clunky for a back and forth, back and forth conversation, but in Teams, it's a bit more like a chat room, kind of testing situation. So I would guess that students would be more comfortable with that.

Kirsti Clarida 17:02
We have a - because of the way our program is set up and and also because of some of our accrediting bodies, we do have student representatives that that will come to meetings with staff, talk about what they're noticing, and give feedback to feedback, and that's been something that we've been doing for a number of years in, in our face-to-face delivery. And now our student reps are actually leading their own channels on Teams and their own Teams groups. And so it was really cool, this year, when they asked me to help them and show them how to set it up and they're having great fun with it and they're, they're sending messages out to their groups to let them all know about feedback, they're sharing messages to each other that way, back and forth, and I think that is another reason why maybe they're inspired to reach out to each other there. They have school business running through Teams anyway, so they're already connected. The other piece that I noticed with the chatter is I have been using and had also been using Collaborate. And when I record my lectures in Collaborate, anytime there is a chat, it makes a noise in the recording, and it draws the viewers attention over, and I was getting feedback from students about how distracting that could be because sometimes when students together in the lecture, they were bringing the social chatter there. So I've had to encourage them to take the social chatter out of the lecture and bring that social chatter to Teams. I know, and I have my phone kind of beside my computer, so if they are answering a question and they want to answer it a private, they'll sometimes just PM me in Teams and say, "well this was my answer" and it doesn't ding in the lecture. So I'm also multi-tasking so that this recorded preservation of my lecture isn't distracted by - I mean, we're in an animal field, too, so they all want to talk about their pets, so they talk about their pets, and they talk about food. They are having fun. But in a lecture that wouldn't be happening, if it was live they wouldn't have spoken up but because it's chatting in Collaborate or another recorded feature, they will. But if I move it off to Teams, I find that it's a little bit easier.

Jennifer Peters 19:10
And it kind of reminds me of the olden days of the back channel. When you go to a conference, there'd be a back channel where you'd be chatting with everybody at the conference and you know, sharing things and taking notes together. So it really brings that into the, into our modern date.

Jason Dojc 19:25
I would love that they do it during class. Like in the chat that - I mean, I do my classes on Zoom but it would have been on Teams or whether it was Zoom - it doesn't matter. They have you have the back channel in the in the chat, and the back channel is hilarious, and then sometimes I bring the back channel back into the lecture and it makes for a more organic class. And it's forced me to actually treat the class like a show, almost like a podcasting show, like what we're doing now. I'll say, "Oh and Matt's asking about this..." And I'll bring it back into the lecture. Sometimes I take some of the back channel like, :oh that's gold" so and I'll bring that in. So that it's preserved in the recording as well.

Kirsti Clarida 20:07
And sometimes, when that happens, they what they're saying. So if I'm talking about a lesson and they inspired them of a memory and they're bringing up a memory of an animal and our friend, sometimes that's such a teachable. I can actually say, :hey I just noticed that so and so said this, I'm going to talk about that let's look at that" because, bringing it contextually to the learner is really what it's about and if they've been inspired to remember something and I can turn that into, "how does our curriculum of the day reflect your memory, let's, let's go there." So, I like it.

Jennifer Peters 20:37
We'll be back right after this. Are you teaching a course at Seneca that contains online articles, books, videos, or web pages? Do your students keep getting lost with redirects in different platforms? Leganto offers a flexible way to keep all your course materials organized and easy to access by your students, right from your course. You'll no longer have to worry about students finding broken links or having a hard time buying their textbook. Best of all, you can save time by working with your librarian and your colleagues to find free curated resources tailored to your courses' topics. You can use the list over and over, and update when needed each semester. If you're interested in streamlining your course readings, reach out to your liaison librarian, or email librarians@senecacollege.ca. And now back to our story.
Jennifer Peters: 21:25
So you've demonstrated using Teams for creating a community hub for your class, for creating backchannels during classes, for doing orientations, for group projects. So you're using it in a bunch of different ways. If a faculty is interested in getting started with their students, what would be your advice to them to get started?

Kirsti Clarida 21:46
The general channel, when you first create a team - I, I'm not, I'm not as happy with the model for the "Classroom" setup. I typically prefer to set up a Team for "Other," and then I can tailor it a little bit more specifically to what I want it to do. That was my learning lesson number one. The second learning lesson is that it will always create a "general: channel for you and unless you choose to lock it down, then students or anyone involved in the team can post whatever they want on the general and you as the moderator have no control over deleting it.. ever! So, I have learned after trying it out myself that I lock the general, and that way if I want to say it's one way communication, this is just a standard I want everybody to read it. And I know that students aren't going to have to scroll up or down in the thread of what their friends have been asking to find the information again. But I also, when I lock the general channel, is create the group chat channel, and I don't moderate that unless you know there's questions being asked or that need me to chime in. I let them have their back and forth. I'm watching it. And they can they can ask away. But it just keeps that one that main page just nice and clean.

Jennifer Peters 23:06
That's really interesting. It's like that's a good tip where it's the kind of landing page for the team. So every time they land there, they'll see the most important information that you've posted or announcements and things like that. And then if they want to chat, they can go to other channels.

Kirsti Clarida 23:19
Ahhm I didn't know that the first time I set out my orientation, so it was learning because of that. That in the first few days, while orientation itself, there was a lot of questions and there was a lot of talking, and that was preserved. But then even in the first couple of weeks, I would see that when students were answering each other, sometimes it was just asking them to scroll up to the top of the general channel. And I thought, "well, how do I delete the chatter in the middle?" And I went looking for the answer, and the answer is we can't, because we didn't make it. So, only the person who makes the post can then come back and remove the post and that wasn't possible for me to do. So I duplicated that team, which is another thing you could do - you can copy it - so I duplicated it entirely, all my tabs, all my links, but then I, I, it doesn't duplicate the chats, so I then locked down the General tab, so then this fall, I'm going to use that one for my new crew, and I've given them their chat channel, so that we can we can be friendly and encourage community, but also not lose sight of maybe these top important posts that I don't want to get lost in the process.

Jason Dojc 24:27
So here's the biggest learning I've, you know, for for anyone starting out with Teams. You know how we always tell you to be prepared and try to do things, right off but you know, make sure you're prepared - do it like well ahead of your class starts? Don't do it; procrastinate. (laughter) Here's why. Your class roster could be changed, could change even into week two, and then - so last semester, I, there were 10 students who were not like who weren't in Blackboard and therefore not in my Team, and I had to figure all this out. "Okay, I gotta add you to a group, I gotta add you..." I actually had to spend like a half an hour after class just sorting them all out.

Kirsti Clarida 25:14
Did you migrate them all on your own to bring them into your channels?

Jason Dojc 25:19
Yes.

Kirsti Clarida 25:20
Okay, so I tried that, too. And I noticed the same thing. And so, this semester, for the winter delivery when I made my course teams, I made a link, a tool link in Blackboard, that hyperlinked them right over. And it says, "Join Course Team.: And that way, I had every student that was enrolled in the Blackboard that stayed in the Blackboard course to come over to my team instead, and that helped me to take off the ownership of me trying to populate them one at a time.

Jennifer Peters 25:55
Just to walk through that process, you took the link from Teams where it says, "share this link to invite people to your Team." And then you pasted that in the menu of your course using the "Add Tool" so that it's in the menu.

Kirsti Clarida 26:07
Yes, I chose "Add Tool Link" and the tool was a hyperlink, an internet link, and I copied it there and I pasted it and then I changed the word to say, "Join" - so for example, one of my courses is code VMT, "Join VMT Team," and that if they click on it in the menu items on the left hand side of Blackboard, it takes them right to our Team.

Jason Dojc 26:30
So you put the onus on the student to have to join the team?

Kirsti Clarida 26:34
Yes I did, I did I brought them over.

Jason Dojc 26:38 I was too nice. That was the thing. I just I just tried to set it up from the mailing list but... Now I know. I'm like, "it's your responsibility, you are over 18, you are adults, you should do this."

Kirsti Clarida 26:49
Well, I do have one... so, I have I have many Teams running. I do have one Team. I'm also the Coordinator. So for the Coordinator, I self migrated because I wanted to make sure that I could show them how to use it. I wanted to teach them how to use it. I wanted them to be able to reach me privately. If they, you know, in an emergency and I took the onus on that as that part of my responsibility. But as their Prof, they now this group of students can now reach me five different ways. So I said okay, you use this with me now, for months. This is the Team for this course. Join me, meet me here. And so they do. I also put the same link in my faculty contact card. So they, even if they don't catch it there, and they want to know how to reach me, this is how you reach me come to see me in Teams. This is my office and I, I sent them that too. Yeah.

Jennifer Peters 27:38
Okay, so we've got procrastination, as recommended by Jason, (laughter) which I think is great idea I think for this kind of work if you're going to be doing it manually. But Kirsti's plan for that is to add the invite your students to the Team in the Blackboard course.

Jason Dojc 27:55
Make them responsible.

Arushi Manners 27:57
It sounds like there's lots of benefits to using Teams alongside a course LMS. But have you experienced students having any trouble navigating multiple platforms? Or have they expressed anything of the sorts?

Jason Dojc 28:12
Yes, they have, and so then I'll go back to them: "If you don't have a problem navigating between Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, and all the social platforms that you're on, you shouldn't have a problem navigating between Blackboard, Teams, Trello, Zoom, or any of the other tools that I give you." I've never heard a handyman complain, "why are there three kinds of screws? Why can't they just have settle on Roberts head versus Phillips head?" You never hear that. This is a good thing that there are multiple platforms. That's how innovation happens - when there's competition, and there's lots of different platforms, and they all have to compete with each other.

Jennifer Peters 28:53
That's an interesting anecdote. I never heard the screwdriver anecdote. Interesting. And Kirsti, have you had any students expressing concern?

Kirsti Clarida 29:03
I have, yeah. I find that there are increasing challenges when different professors are adding more. So, some of our some of our training might be including three other websites that have their own platforms or then somebody else might be using this version of a pre-recording and that. And I think that when I've gotten these concerns of these questions , it has largely to do with the fact that the student didn't have enough time to orient themselves with the technology, as opposed to that there may be upset that there's many. It's that they just don't feel confident in using them all at the same time. So one of the things I do is I actually invite them to meet me in Teams and I walk them through it. I say, "share your screen, now click that button, now click this button, and let's do that." I also sometimes will email, either in an announcements. Actually I use my Announcements page for this, but I'll also email it or I'll post it as an item, I'll post the breadcrumbs. I'll write Course Tools, and then greater than symbol, Files and then greater than symbol, and I walk them through it step by step because different people perceive information differently. For some, it's me sitting with them walking them through the tech, and for others, they'll just copy and paste those little breadcrumbs, and then they'll, they'll learn it pretty quickly. But I also think that as part of our strategy for the college and just in general for for life, navigating technology is the new norm. It's not even, can you choose to do it or not, the answer is you need to for progression in your career and for success. And so, I'm still going to stick with more than one modality just because I think it's important.

Jennifer Peters 30:44
Well I think especially in both of the fields that you teach in, so Veterinary Science and Marketing, there's a lot of technology involved in both of those fields. So, strengthening digital literacies across the board. It's almost like exercising a muscle. Oh, I got to learn this, okay I got to pick up this, how do I figure this out quickly. It's almost like exercising that muscle of adapting to technology.

Kirsti Clarida 31:07
Absolutely. And one of the - it's - I've been having this conversation with a few students now, because we've just come from semester, a semester transition, so progression. And there's, there's a lot, rightly so, of concerns that maybe you know COVID made some changes to their level of education and one of the things I keep bringing it back to them is that there are skill sets in people that employers are looking for that are not written into your curriculum, and one of them is resiliency. And, despite what you think may be happening with the curricular level, you are now inadvertently learning how to be a resilient, growth mindset employee, and that makes you really attractive to anyone. And, you know, in the veterinary field, you might say it's, you know, if you want to say that a horse doesn't spook easily, you say they're bulletproof. Like these are going to be bulletproof students. These are going to be students that are going to graduate with an idea that something new is crossed your desk, you're going to have to learn to adapt, can you learn to adapt in a medical profession. Holy cow. That's amazing. We need that. That's what you're looking for. And so, by accident or intention, they are learning how to be adaptable, to learn new, to learn fresh, to agree that they don't know it all right away but they'll get comfortable using it. They're gonna practice it. I just think it's just what used to be a soft skill is actually a need-to-have skill and I think we're doing it right now through different uses of technology.

Jason Dojc 32:32
Yeah, I don't think I could say it that well. But I was gonna talk about adapting but I don't think I'm gonna say it as well as well as you just did, Kirsti.

Jennifer Peters 32:43
It's an excellent point and I think it's it's a sort of a matter of finding balance. So, pushing the students to excel and to learn and to challenge themselves, but not stressing them out so much that they quit school. So it's just that, pushing them and and and having them grow those skills but not endangering the mental health kind of thing.

Kirsti Clarida 33:05
And I think part of that too is, is making sure that as faculty, we remind ourselves that more and more we use technology, it just seems like it's commonplace, and I think there's an easy place for us to assume that especially younger students will just know this stuff and the answer is they don't. So there's still a lot of younger students that don't understand or don't spend a lot of time on the computers, and that we need to make time for using technology to teach them how to use that particular program, whether it's a video tutorial, whether it's the breadcrumbs, whether it's spending time with them on offering just, you know, a drop-in town hall chat, where we're going to learn how to use Teams today, and letting them come to you, because it's a fair and safe place to do it. That's really important when we're when we're implementing it.

Jason Dojc 33:58
And another thing with this tech - what COVID and having to do class remotely has shown as done is, it's forced us to even to rethink our classes. I've - there there are things that I probably wouldn't have created that I probably I should have created, but because I was in class, I figured, "I'll just deal with it you know, live," that now I have, so now I have much more educational products as a result of having to go remotely. Like it's and it's, it'll make my in-class, when we go back to in-class, that much better.

Jennifer Peters 34:33
So do you think you'll still use your, the way you've set up Teams, do you think you'll still use that when we're back in the classroom?

Jason Dojc 34:38
100%.

Kirsti Clarida 34:40
Oh yeah, without a doubt.

Jason Dojc 34:42
Without a doubt, because I want I want to create. First of all, I like that it now, it now gives a voice to those people who aren't comfortable speaking in class. And secondly, it's just far more convenient to communicate to students in between classes.

Kirsti Clarida 34:58
Even some of the other just unimagined benefits. I've got some students that will have reached out to me to talk to me about issues they're having in their personal life, that they just didn't, or wouldn't have been able to do that before because being at school and being a person is too busy and there's ears hearing and they'll just send me a private message through Teams and they'll say, "Can we talk?" And either we'll chat about it or I'll meet with them and then they'll share these things, and they feel safer to do it that way. But I'm not sure that they would have come to my office and done it. I'm not sure that would have booked that appointment. I'm not sure they would have stopped me in the hall. I actually think that they feel safer because they're at home, they're in their space. They could be in their bedrooms, they can be with their family, and then they can, they can broach these subjects and, and I think it's really. Yeah, I, I can't see myself not using this.

Jason Dojc 35:42
I'm also finding I'm getting to know the students, just as much, if not more, than I did in person.

Kirsti Clarida 35:48
Yeah, that's true.

Jason Dojc 35:50
And maybe it's gonna have the cameras or I'm seeing the, you know, it's prompting you to just talk. Like I have one student who she brings her four year old son sometimes into the class. It's hilarious. It's great. I mean, we love it. It's a nice break.

Jennifer Peters 36:03
You're getting to meet everybody's pets, I'm sure.

Kirsti Clarida 36:06
Totally, I get to see that.

Jason Dojc 36:07
And they're getting to meet mine.

Kirsti Clarida 36:08
Yeah. I also, I did it a lot last year, too, because one of my math classes was it you know it ended up, I think four o'clock on a, on a Friday; it was a real bummer. So I would close out with Spotify, because I could play a Spotify, and I have my computer set up so it runs through a set of speakers, so it would come back into my meetings, and the students would have a dance party. And they got to, the last five minutes of class, I'm like, "okay what's the playlist today guys, what's the playlist?" And then the winning song would vote and I pull it up on Spotify and away we go. I've got to admit, it's a fun way to connect. I never would have done that in a classroom. I never would have done it.

Jason Dojc 36:46
I have a challenge issued out to all my classes - and a couple students have done it, you can see one of them on my Instagram, I'm going to post another - where they all have to come up with a creative Zoom-based Bernie meme. You know, something wouldn't have happened in class, but it's it's happening now, so there's the challenges out to all my classes. Kirsti, if your kids - if your students want to do it, too, bring it on.

Kirsti Clarida 37:10
Nice, that's fun. That's fun. Yeah, I got some, and I agree with you that so but there's still some students that maybe don't engage, but I don't think that the percentage - and this is all anecdotally, I'd have to really read some numbers - but it doesn't feel to me like it's any more or less than it would be if it's live. In fact, I think that I get more feedback from students that typically would have not put up their hand, not spoken out, you know, just because they can now. There's, it's all very safe. They would love to participate in that. I'll have to reach you offline and I have to get the link.

Jason Dojc 37:41
And that's a feature suggestion I would have for Teams and all its competitors. It would be great if we had stats on participation rates for students, both verbal and chat, because then we could actually, first of all, we can use it for research purpose, to see if that if this actually happened is that we're bringing people out of their shell, but it also helps us see, "okay which students are participating, which students are just hanging back, and we can engage them in other ways."

Kirsti Clarida 38:07
That's true. Just like the availability in Blackboard, we can look and see last access, we can look and see how frequently they're accessing certain files, if you need to. Yeah, that that is a good idea.

Jennifer Peters 38:18
Cool. Anything else you guys wanted to share about your Teams experiences with your students?

Kirsti Clarida 38:23
I'm a real proponent of it and I'm going to continue to use it and I, I love that I can bring in features and make it the central hub.

Jason Dojc 38:31
I think that the thing I like most about Teams is it allows the class to happen outside of class time. In my field, things change all the time or there's some things if there's a new campaign or I see something interesting and often, you know, it's because I'm sitting scrolling on my phone or something like that, about, "Oh, I bet the class would love to have that!" This allows me to do that. And then it also allows the class to have conversations, outside of class time, I think that's the biggest plus to it.

Jennifer Peters 39:02
Sounds like an excellent tool to achieve that community and engagement that faculty are always struggling with in online classes, especially, but even face-to-face classes, too.

Kirsti Clarida 39:12
Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Jennifer Peters 39:14
Well thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your stories about using Microsoft Teams with your students. I think you've demonstrated some amazing ways to help students be more successful in the classroom, engage more in the classroom, and develop those relationships that we hope they do. So thank you so much.
Jason Dojc 39:28 Thanks for having us.
Kirsti Clarida 39:29
It's great to have an invite. Thank you.

Arushi Manners 39:31
Thank you so much.

Jennifer Peters 39:37
Thanks to Jason and Kirsti for sharing their story of using Microsoft Teams with their students. For more information about their story, including a link to resources mentioned, please visit our website at bit.ly/podcasttlc. Next episode, we'll be hearing some novel and unique ways to conduct online math assessment with Kevin Pitts. Watch for that in early March. Thanks for joining us and see you next time on "Teaching and Learning Stories from the Field," from the Seneca Teaching & Learning Center.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai