Designing the Teams within ‘Teams’ Structure 

This took time and deep consideration. All members’ ability to create Teams on their own was quickly removed by our institution (powershell script). All Team creation is centralised and controlled by just one person who has a knowledge of the school structures and the possibilities of targeting information to Teams and/or particular groups within Teams. This was necessary as many people will need time to appreciate when a new ‘Team’ is justified or a new ‘Channel’ within a Team is actually the answer. To understand this requires a good working understanding of:

• Team Types
• ‘Showing/Hiding’ Teams 
• ‘Notification’ settings in channels
• ‘Owners’ functionality versus ‘Members’ functionality within Teams
• Team and Channel settings for making posts
• Content management sharing

Once the possible information flow structures are well understood, it is then possible to consider the deployment of schools cohorts such as:

• school classes
• subjects/courses
• staff and student organisations, clubs and societies
• faculty areas
• year level groups
• house/pastoral care groups

Naming conventions for groups were also important at this point to ensure Teams are easily found and organised. Our institution decided on the following formats:

• All Teams that are staff only begin will begin with the work “Staff” in their name. For example,
  • ‘All of Staff’ Team and ‘Staff Executive’ Team. The contents of the “Staff of Nossal HS” setup also describes our approach to using O365 for Content Management and will be explored more fully later.

• • Faculty/domain areas

• • Staff course areas. This is where the ‘Golden’ version of the OneNote is established for each course running in the school. From this OneNote, content is imported to each class OneNote at the beginning of each year/semester. Also, shared resources such as the writing of assessments, purchased electronic materials, practice exams, etc. are stored in the SharePoint site within each of these Teams areas. 
    

• • Staff Professional Learning Communities 

• All Teams that are Student Clubs or Societies start with ‘NCS – ‘ (which stands for Nossal Clubs and Societies) 

• Our Year level groupings start with “Class of “
  • Class of 2020 through to 2023

• Our pastoral system is house-based and so each Team begins with the word ‘House’
  • House Phoenix (with tutorial/home groups arrangement by underneath – this approach will be explained under the section Communication Protocols)

• Classes were simply named according to Year level, Subject Area then Group
  • 2020 Unit 3_4 Physics Gps 1_2 
    (Combined groups as I teach both and it makes my life easier and is actually better for students also)

• There was also a need to for Team that connected all staff and all students so that information that could not be suitably targeted was able to be provided to staff and students within the school. For our institution, this meant establishing an all-encompassing Team:
  • Nossal Staff and Students