This guide is intended to support teachers with setting up live streamed lessons in Teams. The live lesson can be viewed by students and other staff who have access to the class Team.
Teams Live lessons – key safeguarding points
Check your Teams meeting settings
After you have scheduled your live lesson (or started a “meet now” lesson), follow the guidance to ensure that the appropriate meeting settings are in place to prevent students from bypassing the lobby and from having presenter access rights that enables them to share content, admit/remove and mute others during a live lesson.
Disable the “Allow attendees to unmute” in the Teams meeting option if necessary to have full control over who can speak when during the lesson.
Be extremely vigilant with who you admit into your lesson
Follow the guidance to ensure that you only admit the students who are logged in using their school account and are meant to be joining your lesson.
Guest users and users joining outside of the organisation must not be admitted. In certain instances, a guest user may not be clearly defined as a guest user. Follow the guidance which shows how you can spot these to ensure they are not admitted into the lesson.
If other staff members are in the lesson with you, you can give them presenter rights which will enable them to support you with admitting students into the lesson.
At the end of the lesson use the “End meeting” option
Follow the guidance to ensure that you use the “End meeting” option which will end the meeting for all participants rather than using the default “Leave” option.
Scheduling a meeting in a Team
Navigate to the Team where you would like to host the scheduled lesson. Drop down the menu next to meet and select ‘Schedule a meeting’
Enter the meeting details
- Give the lesson a title.
- Only invite other members of staff, students should not be invited through the meeting. Students will see the join information in the Team.
- Set the time and date for the meeting.
- The Team and channel should be automatically selected.
- Leave the location field blank.
- Enter any other details the students may require for the meeting.
Once you have completed the details for the meeting click send.
Set meeting options – (Important)
Once you have created the meeting, click on the 3 dots next to the meeting in the Team and select ‘View meeting details’
Select Meeting options within the meeting details window.
Once selected your browser will open and present you with the following options. The settings in Red must be set to “Only me”, the settings in Green are optional.
Click on the Save button to save the meeting options
To see a full breakdown of presenter and attendee settings click here
Please note that the staff member creating the Teams meeting needs to be the person that is running the live lesson so that they can admit students (and other staff that are joining) into the lesson. After admitting another member of staff, you can give them presenter rights to help support you with admitting students into the lesson, see here for details.
Changing meeting option during a meeting – (Important)
Once the meeting has started, you may wish to amend or check the meeting options.
Select the 3 dots at the top right of the meeting and select ‘Meeting options’.
The settings in Red must be set to “Only me”, the settings in Green are optional.
What do I need for my lesson?
- A laptop with Teams installed and logged in
- Audio options selected and tested
Getting set up before your lesson begins
Sensitive information
To prevent sensitive information from accidentally being displayed during the lesson, ensure that you only have open the applications and files that you will be using during the lesson. For example email should be closed down before starting the lesson.
Applications
Make sure before your lesson starts any applications you would like to use or demonstrate in the lesson are open with the correct material. For instance is PowerPoint open with the correct presentation?
Starting the Teams meeting
Navigate to the Team where you have scheduled the meeting, click on the meeting and then click the Join option.
Meeting lobby – (Important)
Students will now appear in the lobby when they join the meeting.
Do not admit anyone that is not logged in with their school account, someone joining as a guest could be someone that is not from the school or a student trying to impersonate someone else.
Guest users also do not have the same restrictions applied as students in your school.
Please note that in certain instances, a guest user may not be clearly defined as a guest user. Follow the guidance below which shows how you can spot these to ensure they are not admitted into the lesson.
To allow people in from the lobby select the people icon to view who is waiting in the lobby. Click on the red cross next to any users who are not logged in using their school account to prevent them from joining the meeting. You can verify that users’ waiting in the lobby are logged in using a school account by clicking on the round icon next to their name and verifying that you can see their school email address. Click on the green tick for students that you recognise and are logged in using their school account to allow them into the meeting.
See the screenshot and examples below showing how to spot guest accounts, accounts outside of the organisation and how to spot a genuine school account.
See below for the numbered user accounts waiting in the lobby in the screenshot above and what course of action you should take for each one.
- DO NOT ADMIT – this is someone joining via an Office 365 account outside of the organisation as shown by the “outside your organisation” text under their name.
- DO NOT ADMIT – this is someone joining as a Guest (not logged in) as shown by “(Guest)” at the end of their name.
- DO NOT ADMIT – this is someone joining as a Guest (not logged in) on a mobile device such as an iPhone/iPad or Android phone/tablet. Unfortunately this does not show that they are a guest at the end of their name, you can spot that they are a guest by a combination of seeing that their availability icon is showing as white (status unavailable) and by clicking on the round icon next to the their name to see that no email address can be seen.
- OK to Admit (if you are expecting them to join) – this account is logged in using their school account which can be verified by both seeing that the availability icon is showing as red (in a call) and by clicking on the round icon next to the their name to check that their school email address is displayed.
How to make another staff member a presenter
After admitting another staff member into the meeting you can “promote” them to the presenter role which will enable them to support you with admitting students into the lesson and give them the ability to share content during the lesson as well.
Sharing your screen
Once you have started the meeting you will want to share content with the students in the lesson. Select the upwards arrow from the toolbar in the meeting.
You now have 3 options to choose from to best suit your lesson.
- Desktop (Recommended) – select the screen you would like to share, this will show everything on your screen. This option is great if you have multiple applications that you would like to use in the lesson. For example you have a PowerPoint presentation but would also like to use the visualiser to help explain more complex parts.
- Window – if you would just like to show a single application you can select that here. You may just want to use a single application for example Promethean ActivInspire.
- PowerPoint will show any PowerPoint presentations you currently have open or click ‘Browse’ to open a PowerPoint file you would like to present.
- Note when presenting a PowerPoint participants can navigate the presentation ahead of what you are presenting. To prevent this select the eye icon in the PowerPoint navigation.
Managing students during the lesson
Mute individual students
To mute an individual student select the people icon, select the 3 dots next to the student and then select “Mute participant”.
Mute entire class
If you need to mute all participants in the meeting you can click Mute all in the people window.
Removing a student from the lesson
To remove a student from a lesson, select the 3 dots next to the student and then select the “Remove from meeting” option.
Raise Hand
Students can use the raise hand option in Teams when they have a question or would like to make a comment. To use the raise hand feature the user simply needs to select the raise hand option from the meeting toolbar.
At the end of the lesson – (Important)
Once you are ready to end the lesson click on the arrow pointing downwards next to the “Leave” option in the Meeting tool bar and then select ‘End meeting’. This will end the meeting for all participants and prevent students from re-joining.
