How to make a Homepage for your Microsoft Teams group / class - great for online remote learning

[@TichingLAB]

Mr Tompkins thanks fot the great video.... In Team I have a top bar with the options to Edit, is possible to disable that top bar? Thanks again!

[@MrTompkins]

The edit button is only going to be visible to group owners - usually the teachers of the group. Students are normally added as members and will not have editing rights, and so the button should not appear for them. 😀

[@robertgreen5842]

Thank you for this. At 6:20 you have a tiled view of all your teams. How do you get this> I can't see how to get that option. Thanks

[@MrTompkins]

Hey Robert! THe tiled view is an EDU-only customisation, so if you are not using a licence issued from an education tenancy, you are not going to see this. If you are EDU, then the you can change your view by tapping on your avatar, top right, and going to settings->general->Layout and choosing the "grid" view.

[@robertgreen5842]

@@MrTompkins Thank you. No, I have the Business version of Teams - but what you have written is really useful for us. Thank you. And thank you for the speedy reply - teacher working on Sunday mornings!! I remember it well.

[@haschd]

This is great. Many thanks. But how do you actually make this new SP homepage the default opening page for the Team? Our defatul Team screen is the "Post" screen, but would prefer to make the default opening Team page the new SP homepage. Is that possible?

[@niclounivis6369]

Hello i inserted in my homepage à group calendar, it is displayed in the web site version but not in the team Channel, can you please tell me what i should do , thank you

[@ninamindblossom9093]

Awesome help! Thank you😊

[@MrTompkins]

You're welcome Nina Mindblossom! Have fun with it!

[@annad-w463]

Amazing help. Thanks

[@MrTompkins]

You're welcome Anna D-W! TIme to get creating!

[@chihungngai3065]

Hi thx and nice work. But unfortunately i donot have the SharePoint icon when i press the plus sign , only have sharepoint document, is there any way as alternative to find this icon?

[@MrTompkins]

Sorry - can you give me a little more detail? Where exactly are you seeing this + sign?

[@meganrivsclassroom7308]

i wish you had a public teams we could join. how fun it would be to learn through experiencing it with you!

[@meganrivsclassroom7308]

is there a way to make this the default view for the general channel? If i understand correctly, this is an added tab, so students only see this if they click the + and click it that way, right? is there a way to force it so they see it this way first?

[@MrTompkins]

Hey Megan Riv! That's a great idea - let me have a think about how we might make that happen =)

[@MrTompkins]

They will see the tab with whatever name you gave the page, but currently it's not possible to set it as the landing page when people enter the group. This defaults to the posts tab. This homepage idea just caused a bit of a twitterstorm over the weekend, and even had some of the VPs from Microsoft chipping in. So I took the opportunity to mention this was the most frequent request I'd been hearing from educators who had been trying this out with their classes. So maybe...just maybe...they listen and do something with it.

[@meganrivsclassroom7308]

@@MrTompkins one could hope! There are a few things on Teams i wish they'd update and make more user friendly. This homepage would be super awesome if i could set it as the default landing page. Thanks for the vid. I played with it already :) Stay Awesome

[@MrTompkins]

I've upvoted this feature request on the Teams User Voice site - maybe you can too! microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18695377-change-which-tab-is-default-landing-page-for-a-tea

[@tibi8151]

Can you make this page appear as they click on the team by any chance?

[@MrTompkins]

Not yet - but if it's something you'd like to see, you can upvote this request on the Teams User Voice site here: microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18695377-change-which-tab-is-default-landing-page-for-a-tea

[@welsh1968]

Awesome.! I can't wait to give this a go 👍

[@MrTompkins]

Have fun with it!

[@Tony4CEOs]

Very helpful with specific, Useful Examples May I ask, may I create a Sharepoint webpage only for the entire team or might I have a for an individual channel or separate webpages for each channel?

[@MrTompkins]

Yes, you should be able to make multiple pages and embed them in various channels. =)

[@lesleypatience5174]

Hi This is great. I have created a page for one of year 10 classes how do I share the same page with my other year 10 classes ?

[@MrTompkins]

Hi Lesley - unfortunately, I dont think there is a way of copying a page from one sharepoint site to another. Each site page needs to be created individually. You could make a communal page and share this to multiple teams, but you would need to make sure you created it in a site that all the classes have access to. This is clearly going to be a bit more fiddly!

[@willhunter1457]

Hi, in each SharePoint site there is a documents folder by default where the members, owners etc can access the files within that site. As you mentioned in the video about using SharePoint as a network drive for your students files etc, would you be able to do a video on showing how to map the SharePoint documents as a network drive? Thanks!

[@MrTompkins]

Hey will. The easiest, and probably the best way is to set up a SharePoint site and use it the same way you would use OneDrive, via the browser. However, staff raised on network drives find this a bit of a jolt, so we are using a tool called “Cloud Drive Mapper”, by iAMCloud, which we are using to map both their personal onedrive for business drive and a shared document library hosted in a sharepoint site. The tool is pretty good but can confuse staff on occasions when it doesn’t run or connect properly. I’d like to eventually wean them off of it, but they are not quite ready yet! Using sharepoint for shared storage is a great way to go though as you get so much storage space compared to a traditional SAN.

[@Jazzywaw16]

This was great thanks for sharing …. Can you do one on getting parents involved in teams to see what students have been doing it not doing

[@MrTompkins]

Hey Jasmine - the tools for reporting to parents are a little limited in Teams presently. There is the "parent/guardian weekly digest" which can be turned on for the whole school and reports on assignments set and completed. It's either on or off for the whole school and there are no other options available. Before you turn it on, you'll need to import your parents email addresses via School Data Sync.

[@MrArray1967]

What, only 9 comments!!! Marvelous! Tell me Mr. Tompkins EdTech please 🥺 if you put "all" that effort into such a webpage is it possible to reuse the *same* webpage for another math class at the same grade next year or do you have to start all over?

[@MrTompkins]

Hey Regnar - it's only been up a day so hopefully it gets a few more views and comments yet! In the meantime, you have my full attention =) I think you would need to start over. I had a quick look and couldnt find a way of copying a page over to another group. But even if you could, you'd probably need to edit all the webparts as these would most likely be pointing at documents libraries in the other team. Once you've made a few of these, they are pretty quick and easy to knock together, so hopefully it isnt too big a task to make a new one...

[@MrArray1967]

Probably more viewers and comments will show up as time passes🙂 Since March I've "collected" among others your channel and videos and shared with my colleagues but only last week or so some noticed the possibility to use @-mention. No one can say they didn't know. I was almost publicly crusified when I suggested colleagues and school leaders to do that so that we would get notified about "important" information. It's like going up hill. Thanks for sharing your videos. And of course you answer also which makes sense.

[@MrTompkins]

Ha! I recognise your struggles! I've been trying to get my colleagues to sit up and take notice of tools like Teams and OneNote for years. At least with the current situation, they now finally begin to recognise the benefits...One step at a time!

[@JuanStark]

Thanks 👍

[@MrTompkins]

Welcome 👍

[@lisafitzpatrick2851]

Thank you so much for taking the time to show us this - can't wait to have an experiment with it 😀

[@MrTompkins]

You can do quite a lot of cool things with sharepoint pages. Takes a bit of experimenting sometimes to get it to fetch exactly what you want, and not return results that are too wide or narrow. Have fun with it!

[@lisafitzpatrick2851]

@@MrTompkins thank you. I"m going to start with my lovely year 7 who are very clear with their feedback 😀

[@lisafitzpatrick2851]

Hello. I've created my homepage in SharePoint and it looks amazing. I've then added it to the Team as a Tab but it seems to lose its structure - rather than columns everything is displayed under each other. Any ideas? Thanks for all your help so far 😀

[@MrTompkins]

@@lisafitzpatrick2851 the pages made in sharepoint are "responsive", so they are designed to collapse like this when shown on a lower resolution screen - like an iPad or phone. If it's doing this for you in Teams desktop, try changing your zoom settings (under your avatar, top right).

[@lisafitzpatrick2851]

@@MrTompkins perfect, I will do. Thanks fur the Sunday reply and hope your half term was restful

[@JENAGAL111]

We can’t see the screen as well as we should. Take yourself out the picture, maximize the screen so we can see your instructions better. We don’t want to see a person… IJS

[@MrTompkins]

Hey - thanks for the feedback. I do drop myself and zoom in for the 2nd half of the video, which is the more instructional part, but sorry to hear you are struggling to see the detail in the introduction.