Posted On 24 Jul 2021

With the new academic year not that far away, Microsoft has announced that it will be introducing a novel feature in Microsoft Teams to speed up communications between teachers, faculty, and students. The company has already detailed a package of 35 new features to boost video conferencing and collaboration for teachers, including image-added capacity, working with the Whiteboard web client, large gallery view of up to 49 participants, automatic transcription and more.

The latest feature for educators is already familiar to business uses in Teams, and it involves suggested replies for chat questions so that teachers can swiftly answer questions without having to type. It will be available for Windows Teams for Education in July, and may be added to iOS and Android services later. The software looks at chat context and offers three different answers for teachers to choose from, for example if a student were to ask “Will there be a quiz on this topic this week?” the software could provide the options “Yes”, “No”, or “Possibly” for the teacher to select. For those who are concerned that this feature will make children even more dependent on computers to do their work for them, it will only be available for teachers and faculty; students will still have to type their answers.