Classrooms move virtual with Microsoft Teams amidst the pandemic lockdown

Amidst the corona pandemic, educational institutions are finding new innovative ways to connect to their classes and continue with teaching and the academic year. With social distancing being the mandatory protocol right now, educators are moving to the virtual platform on Microsoft Teams to ensure that learning goes on as usual.

Microsoft Teams, apart from providing the basic video-enabled remote classrooms, provides a host of interactive and collaborative tools on a single platform.

The British School in New Delhi moved onto the Microsoft Teams before the COVID-19 lockdown.

Human beings in general thrive on social interaction, which was missing in traditional e-learning platforms. You can never really replace a teacher because the teacher provides that human interaction, but I think platforms like Teams enable a teacher to be able to reach out to their classroom remotely and continue to interact – Vanita Uppal OBE, Director of The British School.

“Our mission has been to ensure that learning will never be interrupted, no matter what,” says Rashima V Varma, the head of The Ardee School in New Friends Colony.

She further comments, “In the beginning, we invested in a video conferencing solution but soon realized we needed to offer a lot more to our students than video conferencing. Keeping that in mind, we got an Office 365 subscription for the entire school at the beginning of the school session in 2019 as it provided many tools for teaching and learning.”

In November 2019, the Delhi government urged schools to close secondary classes owning it to the unprecedented levels of air pollution. However, it did now slow down or hamper the learning of the students of Delhi-based schools, especially of Ardee School.

The school moved its classes to Microsoft Teams to ensure that the education of its students does not get compromised amidst an environmental crisis. The previous experience of the school with virtual classrooms enabled the school to take up Teams for the entire school in the current coronavirus lockdown.