Category: Events and Awards

Do you need to organise and work with a team on a project? Office 365 Groups is a collaborative tool, enabling you to work collectively when writing documents, creating spreadsheets, working on project plans and scheduling meetings.

The benefits of using Groups in Office 365

Members of a created group will have access to a shared:

• Inbox for group conversations.
• Calendar that all members can see and contribute to.
• 1TB Files Library in OneDrive to store, share, and collaborate on documents, workbooks, presentations, or just about any kind of file.
• OneNote notebook to gather ideas, collaborate and store research/meeting notes.

Accessing Groups in Office 365

1. Sign in to your Office 365 account with your username in the format universityID@newcastle.ac.uk and your university password. E.g. nmc84@newcastle.ac.uk or b1013456@newcastle.ac.uk
2. In the list on the left you should see an expandable section called ‘Groups’ with options to ‘Discover’ or ‘Create’ Groups.

Using Groups in Office 365

Create a group in: Outlook on the web | Outlook 2016

Join a group in: Outlook on the web | Outlook 2016

Have a group conversation in: Outlook on the web | Outlook 2016

Schedule a meeting on a group calendar in: Outlook on the web | Outlook 2016

Share group files in: Outlook on the web | Outlook 2016

Things to consider

Time Sensitive Group Projects:Consider creating a  Microsoft Team for your group. This further enhances group collaboration by offering instant messaging on desktop and mobile in addition to the ability to schedule video meetings and screen sharing.

Audience:  Groups/teams can be made public or private and you can invite members outside of the University to a group or team.

Group/Team Name:  Searchable to all staff and students within the University so please take care when naming your group.

Spring Cleaning: Leave the Office as you found it by deleting your inactive groups.

Make it Private and add a Description:  Add a description to your private group as this will help prevent unwanted joining requests from staff and students.

Group Members Visibility:  Staff and students can see who is a member of a group, even if it is private.

Additional Resources

Office 365 at Newcastle University

Introducing Office 365 Groups

Learn more about Office 365 Groups

Training: Unite your team with Groups

Frequently-asked questions (FAQs) and further ‘How-To’ documentation

In our recent Pizza Pop and Practice event, Dr Ahmed Kharrufa and Dr Tom Bartindale from OpenLab let us loose on an app that Tom has been developing over the last few years called Bootlegger.

Bootlegger makes it easy to help people make videos together using mobile applications.  One person creates a “Shoot” and invites others “the crew” to contribute.  The Shoot contains a template with the set of shots required in the video.  The crew sign into Bootlegger, join the shoot and then choose the shot to take from the template.

We used a template that Ahmed had offered to his students –  one designed to help them capture feedback on Ahmed’s teaching.  (A uniquely student centred view!)

Our film crew of 21 experimented and happily collected over 47 clips. Each person could then view all the clips in the shoot and curate a video by adding clips to a timeline.

Bootlegger made the process really easy and engaging.

You can find out more information about Bootlegger here:

• bootlegger.tv
• https://bootlegger.tv/howtobootleg
• The App can be downloaded from the Google Play and iTunes stores.

Ahmed also introduced us to how the Event Movement site https://eventmovement.co.uk/ site could be used to enable students to co-design teaching sessions.

Ideas in Event Movement move through stages Promote -> Get involved -> Plan it.  Students were invited to contribute ideas for a teaching session, they could vote on the proposed topics and once the topic of the event was selected could get involved in co-designing the session – proposing and voting on different ideas.  Ahmed’s slides from the session give further details.

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