Ten Things Every Teacher Should be Able to do with Office 365

My school district recently adopted the Office 365 platform. Inspired by a post by Jennifer Carey’s article on Ten Things Every Teachers Should Know about Google Docs , I thought I would do the same for Office 365. Of course, you can do so much more, but this is a nice starting point:

Everything in Office 365 is sharable. No matter the type of document you create, you can share it as simply a file to be viewed of one to be edited. There are multiple ways to share a file as well: You can create a link that is sharable or viewable. You can add people in your organization (students or other teachers) simply by adding their emails. You can also turn of ft. sharing once you are through with the document. If you have an organizational account, the person you share with automatically receives an email letting them know about the shared document.

Here is more on how to share a document on Office 365

Once a document is shared with you, or in a document that you have created, you can leave comments on the side. This is especially important if you do not with to actually edit the document, To leave a comment, go to the far right of the document screen and look for the “…” symbol. Click on that and one of the choices is “Comment.” The comment you leave will be placed in a comment section near the cursor of the document. This is great for monitoring student work and giving them feedback before they turn in the final version.

Multiple people (students, teachers, etc) can work on a single document at a time. Not only that, they can work simultaneously. Students wring a paper can self evaluate and self edit each other. Teaches working an a PLC document can work together with out having to be sitting in the same room together. (In this image you can see in the upper right, two people working on a document. There is an unlimited amount that can work at one time.)

OneNote is not just an application for students. Teachers can use it to keep all of their class notes available for students. Not only can they make a general class notebook, but each student can have their own individalized notebook as well.

Every document in Office 365 can be downloaded and printed. Just like sharing, there are multiple ways to download a document.

How to Download a File in SharePoint Using Drag and Drop from itgroove on Vimeo.

Simply click on the Printer icon to get a printable version of your document. In most cases, it shows up as a PDF file, unless you download the file first and edit it in the desktop version. Simply click on the PDF, it will download to your Documents file and it will then be ready to print out.

This is probably the easiest part of Office 365: You don’t have to do a thing! As soon as you create an online document and type a single letter, it is saved automatically into your OneDrive. Every time you change the document, it automatically saves. That is why you will never see a “SAVE” button. You will see a “SAVE AS” in case you wish to make a duplicate document.

A really nice feature for students is the ability in 365 to add images from the web into documents. Once in any document type, click on “Edit Online,” then click on “Insert.” Pictures are two of your choices. You can then search the web inside the document for Creative Commons images for use in the document. Click on the image and it is properly cited as well as inserted.

Once you have your OneDrive open, adding files is as easy as dragging and dropping. You can add multiple files but you cannot drag a folder into OneDrive.

Here is the long way to do it:

Sooner or later you will have WAAAAY too many files on OneDrive. When it comes time for spring cleaning, go back to your old friend the ellipses, the same ones you used to share a file. One of your choices is “Delete.” That means exactly what is says. By the way, you will notice that you cannot “accidentally” delete a document. Deleting is a several step process with the final one being “Are you sure you want to delete this file?”

So there you are. Of course there are thousands of things that you can do with 365, just like in Google Docs, but if you can master these few things, you have pretty much masters Office 365 101.

What do you think are some basics everyone needs in Office 365?