I shared a while back about the cool SEL feature Microsoft added, called Reflect.
Well, back in August they launched an update making Reflect a featured tab in each of Microsoft Teams class – just like Assignments or Grades! As the teacher, you can go in there to see your students’ responses from throughout the school year with a handy-dandy bar graph summarizing the check-in results. Then, you can use it to post new check-ins, including adding some custom questions! And, when you post them, you can choose if you’d like the students to see other students’ answers, anonymously of course, or not. Then you can pick where the check-in is posted to, which is nice since different teachers have different organization strategies in Teams. And you can even preview the student view, which is always a nice feature in edtech tools.
One thing that I love about Teams, by the way, is how it allows you to get a more specific idea of how your student is feeling. I can remember times in Pear Deck, for example, when a student put a frowny face, but when I asked if everything was okay they just responded with: “yah, I’m just tired.” Here in Teams, you can get a more specific adjective for how they’re feeling.
Your students can also see a summary of how the class responded, which I think is nice for normalizing a variety of feelings. Years ago people had to remind each other “it’s okay to not be okay.” I think this goes one step further and gives proof that there are more classmates going through stuff than may meet the eye.
In the teacher view, I love the ability to filter the responses so that you can see which students they may need to follow up with. And, finally, there’s the really cool Together View that shows your class as a set of Feelings Monsters to give you a quick visual of how everyone is doing.
And a big thumbs up from me on the ability to notice trends in students’ feelings – both individually and as a class.
Reflect and Reflect in Microsoft Teams is a FREE app and, according to their site, “meets national, regional, and industry-specific regulations for data collection and use, including GDPR and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that protects the privacy of students’ education records.”
[Image(s) Source: https://reflect.microsoft.com/]
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