Configure Microsoft Teams for Education

Considerations for setting up Teams in an Education environment

Out of the box Microsoft Teams is a tool for collaboration, where communicating using chat, calls, meetings, and sharing and coauthoring documents is meant to be easily accessible, both internally in the organization, with guests, and with external users. Depending on the type of education institution (usually K12 or HED), changes to Teams settings and policies are required to balance the need for collaboration with student safety and other privacy concerns.

Best practices for policy assignment

Our primary recommendation is that you use the Global (Org-wide default) policy definition for students instead of a policy package. This ensures that new users in your organizations always have the strictest set of policies appropriate for students. If this recommendation doesn't meet the needs of your institution, one of the student policy packages might be a good alternative.

Access management by groups

Various tools and topics

1. Teams Policy Wizard
2. Supervised Chat
   1. Support article
   2. Docs
3. Learning management systems (LMS) and Learning tool interoperability (LTI) integrations
4. Insights for Microsoft Teams (either on/off). Security blog
5. School Data Sync
6. Disable self-service purchases for students
7. Generative AI in Teams EDU (on/off)

Next steps

Next steps are configuring Teams policies and settings.