As we start year three of the global pandemic, its impacts on students are becoming clearer. The State of the Global Education Crisis—A Path to Recovery, which is a joint report by UNESCO, UNICEF, and World Bank, indicated that “school closures could cost this generation of students an estimated $10 trillion in lifetime earnings in present value in the intermediate scenario.” Even before the pandemic, educators were already overwhelmed and overworked, and reported that they didn’t have time to complete all of their tasks. This has been a longstanding problem that has only deteriorated during the pandemic. Microsoft and our Education Partners are here to help with tools and features to encourage engagement, simplify collaboration and save time. 

Microsoft Teams’ assignments and Microsoft 365 integrations give our education partners the ability to enable rich end-to-end scenarios within core workflows—for both educators and students. It also makes it easier for instructors to give feedback on assignments. This not only saves educators valuable time, it also gives them a range of powerful features to support the assessment of learning and engage students. 

Here are just a few of the partner solutions that help educators and students accelerate learning to counter the effects of the pandemic.  

Assessment 

Assessment is critical. The ability to assess student reading fluency over time is particularly important in this time of widespread learning disruption.  

The Edword Feedback Suite from EasyCorrect extends the standard Word commenting feature with several timesaving and value-adding functionalities. It engages students with audio comments, saves time, and achieves consistency by creating and reusing library comments. It also automatically generates a summary report including statistics, sum-up, and grades. Edword also facilitates educator collaboration through easy content sharing and gives access to Ouriginal's world-leading plagiarism detection directly in Word in Teams. 

FeedbackFruits offers an all-in-one tool suite that helps educators boost student engagement and interaction with a wide range of active learning activities, such as peer assessment, group member evaluation, and interactive study materials. The tool suite is seamlessly integrated into Microsoft Teams and Learning Management System (LMS).

 

Testportal for Teams lets you create, share, and analyze tests all in one place. Whether you're a business or educational user, Testportal can make sure that your knowledge evaluation is always safe and reliable. Unlike the built-in Forms app, Testportal offers advanced question content creation, question drawing algorithm, time measurement, all-round test supervision, and detailed analysis of results, statistics, and other insights. 

Content

Creating lessons takes time. Microsoft Education partners can provide all the content you need to create fun, interactive, and educational experiences for students. 

Glose for Education offers a collaborative and personalized digital reading platform for classrooms, schools, libraries, and at home. Students benefit from instant access from any device to more than one million e-books, and a social, fun, and engaging reading experience. Drawing on the familiarity and benefits of safe social networking, the platform empowers students to read and comprehend both on their own and with their peers. They can read, discover, annotate, listen, and share text with other students.    

ClickView provides more than 5,000 global schools, colleges, and universities access to high-quality, relevant, and interactive curriculum-aligned video resources. Finding educational videos on common video sharing platforms fit for your class is labor-intensive and time-consuming, with potential copyright concerns. ClickView removes these common headaches and protects students’ safety and privacy with a curated library upholding the highest editorial standards and preventing students from exposure to irrelevant, inappropriate, or inaccurate content commonly found in free video streaming sites and platforms. 

Engagement

Interactive lessons can be a key way to re-engage students and get them excited about learning. 

Buncee is an easy-to-use tool for all your school’s creation needs. Using Buncee, educators and students can create and publish their own authentic and creative work, fostering essential twenty-first century skills, including creativity, communication, critical thinking, and collaboration. As an all-in-one solution, educators and administrators know they have all the tools and template resources on hand to personalize learning and achieve their learning goals with ease. 

Nearpod for Teams easily allows educators to create, download, and add interactive lessons to Teams across all student devices and on any operating system or browser. Educators can easily upload their existing PowerPoints, PDFs, Google Slides, and SWAYS and convert them into interactive Nearpod lessons with quizzes, polls, open-ended questions, 3D objects, and more. 

GoConqr by Examtime provides a range of free tools for teaching and learning. From brainstorming and note-taking to testing and revising, find everything you need with our suite of tools for creating mind maps, flashcards, quizzes, slides, flowcharts, and notes. 

Pandemic learning disruption has impacted students and educators around the globe, and Microsoft Education partners have been working hard to develop student-centered solutions that work seamlessly with Microsoft Education tools. Every student deserves opportunity and equal access to a high-quality education—one that leads to success in career and in life. Learn more about various solutions Microsoft Education partners provide that support our commitment to education equity