Quick start - Set up Teams for Education

Before you begin

1. Deploy School Data Sync to make it easier for educators to automatically create Teams. Contact https://aka.ms/sdssupport for deployment assistance.
2. Configure the correct ports and protocols for Teams. See Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges.
3. Prepare your school's network for Teams.
4. Choose a team type. Teams for Education offers three new types of teams (for a total of four). To understand the differences and use cases of each, see Choose a team type to collaborate in Teams.

Teams Planning guide

Step 1: Get your people together

Assemble a group of individuals from staff, educators, and the educator community to act as the stakeholder & decision-making group for your Teams deployment.

Step 2: Prioritize your scenarios

Pick the most relevant scenarios for your organization instead of talking about features and functions.

Check out the Microsoft 365 FastTrack Productivity Library for examples to help you define scenarios for your school.

Successful Teams deployments often center around highly collaborative teams that work closely together, such as classrooms, professional learning communities, and extracurricular student groups.

Step 3: Conduct pilots and deploy Teams

You’ll want to conduct an initial Teams pilot with your educators, both champions and early adopters. A pilot gives you valuable information about how Microsoft 365 and Teams are received in your school.

Select an interested group of users and a prioritized education scenario to get started.

You can create teams for:

• Classes.
• PLCs.
• Staff members.
• Anyone.

Teams for Education allows admins to create team templates that educators can use to quickly set up teams. For information on how to create team templates, see Get started with team templates in the Teams admin center. To create custom team templates, see Create a custom team template in Microsoft Teams.

Once your pilots are complete, you’ll have the feedback you need to plan your broad Teams deployment.

Be sure your deployment plan accounts for your prioritized scenarios, ensuring your school is getting the most from Microsoft 365 and Teams.

Step 4: Measure usage, manage satisfaction, and drive adoption

To successfully drive adoption of Microsoft 365 and Teams, stay focused on your educators' experience.

Here’s a quick checklist of our best practices to get you started.

1. Read the Microsoft 365 Adoption Guidance for best practices. Also available to you is our supplemental content for creating a change management strategy for Microsoft Teams to document your approach.

2. Study Microsoft 365 activity reports to understand usage across your school. If you aren’t a Microsoft 365 admin, ask your admin to give you Reports Reader permissions so you can access activity reports.

3. Capture feedback from your educators on their experience with Microsoft 365 and Teams. Use a channel in Teams when your school has fewer than 5000 individuals. Use a public group in Viva Engage when your school is larger than the membership limit in Teams.

4. Nurture your champions and highlight your wins. Reward educators for embracing these new tools and using them in innovative ways. This ensures continued use of Microsoft 365 and Teams.

Turn on or off Teams licenses

Once an educator or student has a valid license and Teams has been enabled, they can run the desktop, web, and mobile Teams clients.

They can install these clients themselves. The IT admin doesn't need to deploy these clients.

You can manage individual user licenses for Microsoft Teams by using the Microsoft 365 Admin Center or by using PowerShell. See Microsoft 365 licensing for Teams for information about both methods.

Configure Teams for your school

You can easily manage all Teams policies in the Microsoft Teams admin center by signing in with your admin credentials.

We suggest that you define different policies to manage which capabilities are available to your varying user groups, like educators, students, and staff.

To configure a policy:

1. In the left navigation of the Teams admin center, expand the Teams feature you want to configure. For example, Teams, Meetings, or Teams apps.
2. Find and select the policy page from the expanded menu.
3. Select the policy you want to configure and change its settings.
4. Select Save.

With policies, you can turn on and off features at the per-user level. Here’s how policy assignments work:

• By default, every new user will get the Global policy (tenant-level settings).
• A user can be assigned a pre-defined user policy created by Microsoft, if it meets your requirements. These pre-defined policies aren't editable by admins. If you want to manage these policies in the future, create new custom policies, and assign the custom policies to users.
• A custom policy can be assigned to any user. To create a new custom policy, click Add, choose the settings you want for the policy, and click Save. Then, assign the custom policy to a user by going to Users in the Teams admin center or using a PowerShell script.

Allow different policies for faculty and students

To have custom settings for faculty and students (for example, Chat is turned on for faculty but not for students), there are two methods to create and assign them:

• Use the PowerShell module to run a script to create, and assign multiple policies. See the Appendix for script examples and documentation.
• In the Teams admin center, create a new custom policy, and assign the policy to users on the Users tab.

Use policies and settings to enforce student safety measures

To maintain student safety, you should use administrative policies to control who can use private chat and private calling, who can schedule meetings, and what content types can be shared.

View Keeping students safe while using Teams for distance learning for more details on what policies and setting updates you need to make it safe for students.

Appendix

Create and assign a messaging policy

1. See whether any of the available policies in your tenants suit your requirements by running Get-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy.
2. If not, create a new policy by running New-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy -Identity <policy name> -<parameter name> -<parameter value>.

For more information, see Set-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy

Sample script

See PowerShell script sample - Create and assign a messaging policy.

Distribute clients

Teams has clients available for web, desktop, and mobile. These clients all require an active internet connection and don't support an offline mode.

To get the latest details on the functionality and methods of distribution of each client, check out our Microsoft Teams client topic.

Download clients

The setup file for the Teams client is an executable file that can be downloaded by anyone from the Teams downloads page.

Educators and students on desktops can install the application if they have the appropriate privileges. IT Admins can also distribute the installer through their existing client distribution tools.

End users with mobile devices can download the Microsoft Teams app from the mobile platform’s app store.

Operating system requirements

For system requirements, see Teams client system requirements.

Resources, feedback, and support

For more information on getting set up with Microsoft 365, aiding Teams adoption, providing feedback, or contacting support, see these articles:

Microsoft 365 Education deployment overview

Share Teams adoption resources

Send a suggestion

Contact support