“The product from Microsoft is very easy to set up as it hardly takes 15 minutes to complete the whole process. Secondly, I have been using Office 365 for quite some time and have been just used to it. The products under Office 365 are very intuitive and value-packed. Overall, the product experience is really fantastic.”

– Ankit P., Education Management.

The second wave of coronavirus is expected to hit countries this month, forcing them to impose restrictions once again. As a result, educational institutes will remain closed, preventing students and educators from engaging in in-classroom educational activities, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Teachers and students can use Microsoft Office 365 Education to enable remote teaching and remote learning. Office 365 for education offers several benefits to both teachers and students; a few of them are listed below.

Variety Of Apps And Services

Office 365 Education allows teachers to use several Microsoft apps and services for free and to provide students with an enhanced learning experience. These apps and services can help teachers to meet the educational needs of the students, whether they use it for individualized learning or interactive lessons. Thanks to the click to run technology, these apps can be used by anyone within a few seconds. The A1 plan of Office 365 Education is free to use for both teachers and students and includes;

• Word
• PowerPoint
• Excel
• Outlook
• OneNote

The following services are also available for free in the Office 365 Education’s A1 plan.

• SharePoint
• Exchange
• Teams
• Forms
• School Data Sync
• OneDrive
• Stream
• Sway
• Power Apps
• Flow
• Yammer

Cloud-Based Access and Storage

Office 365 Education is a cloud-based app, stored and supported by Microsoft, which means that teachers and educational institutes don’t own it; they only subscribe to it. This feature makes it easier for students and educators to afford and scale-up the app, if necessary. The cloud storage makes it easier for both students and teachers to access their data from remote locations. They also get unlimited space for storing data, which means that educational institutes don’t have to worry about building an in-house storage server. Under normal circumstances, teachers and students store their data on flash drives to bring it to school, and if they lose the flash drive, they lose hours of hard work. Thanks to cloud storage, teachers and students don’t have to carry a flash drive from school to home or vice versa; they can easily access the stored data from anywhere they want. In times of distance learning and remote teaching, this feature is integral and helps students and educators to stay productive while quarantining in their homes. The data stored on the cloud is protected by advanced encryption, which ensures the safety of the stored data.

Auto Updates

Updating systems and programs is a technically challenging process that consumes a lot of time and requires a substantial amount of resources. This can be a problem for both students and educators working with a limited budget, and in remote learning, it can be even more challenging to bring everyone on the same page.

Office 365 for education is looked after by Microsoft and is stored on the cloud, which means that it gets automatically updated for everyone. Both students and teachers can enjoy the latest technology without depending on the IT team for continuously updating the systems and solutions, which is a great aspect of using Office 365 Education for distance learning and remote teaching.

Career Skills

One of the main goals of education is to prepare students to smoothly transition from the classroom to the workforce, which requires baseline technology skills. Using Office 365 for education enables students to use training tools to learn these baseline technology skills, such as learning how to use teams for meetings, create powerful presentations using PowerPoint, etc. All these baseline technology skills help students to become attractive prospects in today’s competitive job market.

Global Collaboration

With Office 365 Education, teachers, and students get the opportunity to collaborate and comminute with their peers around the world. Using PowerPoint, Word, or Excel, teachers can share information with a school in a different country; for instance, they can create a guide based on their remote teaching experience and share it with teachers that are just beginning to teach remotely. Using SharePoint or Teams, they can enable real-time collaboration and distance learning.

Free Services

As mentioned earlier, the A1 plan of Office 365 Education is free for students and educators; this plan allows teachers and students to continue classes during the coronavirus lockdowns. Basic apps and services are part of the Office 365 Education; teachers and students also get unlimited storage after five subscribers, and they can scale the platform whenever they can if the A1 plan doesn’t meet their needs.

Security and Data Control

Another benefit of using Office 365 for education is that it has built-in security and data control, which helps teachers and students to keep their data safe. Microsoft monitors their server 24/7 for threats and uses anti-malware and anti-spam protection so people can be sure that their data won’t be compromised.

Office 365 Education also enables teachers to organize educational material and set-up data control features for the material. For instance, teachers are creating a test for the students using SharePoint, they can set-up data control, or privacy features for the file, assigning read and write privileges to only the teachers responsible for creating the test.  

Infowise

Here at Infowise Solutions, our client list includes some of the world’s best-known higher educational institutes, which is in addition to many school boards in North America, Europe, Australia, the Middle East and Africa. Our products that are used by the educational institutes are a cross-section of what we offer; workflow automation, process automation, advanced dynamic forms and document management and filing. We have helped thousands of schools and research facilities across the globe in leveraging the power of their Office 365 platform, to its fullest potential to quickly build a wide variety of modern solutions, tailor-made to meet their operational requirements. Through our implementation partners, we have been part of the digitization process for many universities and research organizations. Whether your preference is Microsoft 365 or On-premise our partners will assist and guide you on how best you can get your educational institution on the road onto a successful digitization process.