Microsoft Teams for Education Introduces Grade Sync, Turnitin Integration

Microsoft is introducing some major upgrades for Microsoft Teams for Education at BETT today. The company is introducing a number of new features that will help schools and students that use Microsoft Teams for Education.

The update is introducing a preview of Grade Sync, a new feature that allows teachers to sync grades from assignments in Teams with their institution’s actual Student Information System. The automatic syncing will make sure the data automatically sync without teachers needing to manually transfer the data into the Student Information System for each assignment. Today’s update for Microsoft Teams on Android and iOS also introduces the ability to grade assignments from their phone.

Another major feature being introduced this week is Turnitin integration, a system that is widely used by universities (especially in the UK), for detecting plagiarism on student’s work. The update will allow users to view Turnitin alerts from within Microsoft Teams Assignments, once again making grading much easier than before.

Microsoft says the latest updates to Teams for Education introduces performance enhancements for assignments, and the company is also launching a new Computer Science curriculum in Teams with MakeCode, letting students make their own games with things like JavaScript.

Now all of this is pretty great, but you are probably wondering if any school is actually making use of Microsoft Teams for Education. And according to Microsoft, there has been a 251% growth in usage within schools and universities. That still doesn’t reveal exactly how many schools are using the service, though that is an indication of some solid growth.