IT skills and training

There are a number of ways you can check and test your audio and video device settings

• When you are not in a meeting
• Just before you join a meeting
• During a meeting

Checking your device settings when you are not in a meeting

click on the account icon at the top of the page, this may be your image or your initials, a menu will open, choose Settings

Students and staff are entitled to a free subscription of Microsoft Office for use on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android, which includes:

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive (with 1TB of Storage), Skype for Business, OneNote, Publisher (PC only), Access (PC only) and Teams

Once you have clicked into your meeting you have a number of ways to manage your participants.

If one person will be speaking at a time, it is advisable to ask all other participants to mute their microphones. Teams will try to prioritise the loudest noise it detects so if you have participants with background noises (barking dogs, washing machines etc) then it can make the speakers microphone cut out as it tries to prioritise the other noises it detects.  This is especially important for a large group.

Here are some other hints and tips:

• Start your recording
• Access your recording

Start your recording

Please note, you cannot record a Teams call, it has to be in a meeting. 

When you are in your Teams meeting, select the More icon at the top of the page, and select Record and transcribe > Start recording. All members of the meeting will see a message informating them that the meeting is being recorded. 

Creating a Chat for instant messaging, audio or video calling

You can contact individuals via Microsoft Teams to communicate by text, voice, video and share your screen. This does not require you to join a Team and can be useful for direct communication.

You can set up a Team space to:

• file share
• video or voice call the team
• instant message
• shared notebook (ideal for minuting meetings or sharing ideas) 
• create channels for different topics
• integrate with Microsoft planner to set tasks and deadlines.

This can be useful for projects or for students to have a collaboration space.

If you only want to have online meetings or lectures, you do not need a full collaboration space, instead either:

You can use Microsoft Teams either from the Teams App or by using the web version. You will get the best user experience by using the Desktop App this is installed on all university computers.