Primary School Structure - Teams

Click Here - Editable Folder Structure Template

Staff Lounge Channel (wellbeing focus)

This channel may operate as a casual place for all staff to communicate with fun or interesting content, ask general questions, or organise social events. Essential content should NOT be posted here.

Whole School Team

This 'School Team' will include all staff working at the school in a teaching and administrative capacity.

General Channel

(default channel for every team)

Posts

The 'General Channel' is where (Team Owners) selected staff, admin or executive can post whole school announcements or updates. Restricted posting in the general channel is optional and must be enabled via the ‘manage channel’ settings.

💡 See ‘How-To’ for changing general channel permissions.

Files

Most files and folders within General should have restricted or ‘read-only’ access for general staff. Only executives, administrative and/or select staff should be able to edit documents.

Learning Channels

(stage/ learning group based)

Posts

All essential stage/learning group-based communication should take place within this channel. It should be checked regularly, as you would with your emails (this should replace all internal stage/learning group emails).

Files

Each stage or learning group will have their own channel. All files associated with teaching and learning are stored here including collaborative programs and resources.

Optional –

This is useful for individual staff to store and edit ongoing teaching programs which allows for transparency and easy access by supervisors and additional teachers of the class, grade and/or stage.

💡 Adding ‘Learning’ to the beginning of a channel name allows the learning channels to be grouped together for improved navigation.

Note –

Each bullet point represents a new sub-folder. For example, whole school folder contains 5 sub-folders.

*Due to privacy policies that outline requirements for storage and management of documents and personal information, it is crucial that additional permissions and accessibility granted to the following teams be reviewed on a regular basis.

We also recommend setting your access to creating any new private channel to be restricted to team owners only.

Principal Channel

(Private Channel)

Permissions to private channels are manually managed by the school. Owners of this channel can grant access for staff operating within relieving principal capacities and/or specific executive staff as requested by the Principal.

Files

The Principal channel will be used on an ongoing basis for storage and management of files and/or documents required by the Principal.

Optional –

Principals may choose to add their DEL as an owner or a member of this channel.

Executive Channel

(Private Channel)

Permissions to private channels are manually managed by the school. Owners of this channel can grant access for staff operating within relieving executive capacities and/or specific executive staff as requested by the Principal.

Posts

All essential executive communication should take place within this channel. It should be checked regularly, as you would with your emails (this should replace all internal executive group emails)

Files

The executive channel will be used on an ongoing basis for storage and management of collaborative files and documents required by members of the executive team.

School Admin Channel

(Private Channel)

Permissions to private channels are manually managed by the school. Owners of this channel can grant access for staff operating within relieving capacities and/or specific executive staff as requested by the owners of this channel.

Posts

All essential office communication should take place within this channel. It should be checked regularly as you would with your emails (this should replace all internal office group emails).

Files

This channel should be used on an ongoing basis for storage and management of files and documents required by members of the administrative team. It may contain sensitive and confidential documents relating to staff and/or school operations.

Media Channel

Posts

Communication with website, school social media editors and other media creators.

Files

This will be a storage repository for your school images, videos and other media files.

💡 See ‘How-To’ for creating a user-friendly media library in Teams.

(UPDATE: Microsoft have changed their process somewhat. When you get to the point of Site Contents...New...Apps, you'll see a different screen to that shown in this video. Click the "classic experience" link and you can then add Picture Library as described in the video.)

WG - School Events & Activities Channel

WG prefix helps group like channels together in your listing.

Files

This working group channel is for the organisation of school events and activities, including but not limited to, extracurricular activities such as lunch time groups.

Optional –

It is recommended to create a ‘chat group’ for instantaneous communication and ongoing organisation of events or activities (within smaller staff groups), and use the 'post' section for notifying or communicating to all staff about upcoming events or activities.

💡 See ‘How-To’ for creating and using a Teams chat group.

Timetables Channel

Posts

This channel should reflect updates and changes to current timetables and/or rosters as well as requests and confirming timetable swaps.

Files

Most files and folders within Timetables have restricted or ‘read-only’ access for general staff. Only executives, administrative and/or selected staff should be able to edit documents.

Note –

These permissions must be set manually.

💡 See ‘How-To’ for changing file and folder permissions within Teams/SharePoint.

Optional –

Tabs can be utilized within the timetables channel for quick access to frequently used timetables. This also allows for quick reference on a mobile device.

💡 See ‘How-To’ for creating and using tabs in a channel.

Archiving

Contents within your whole school cloud storage will continue to be created and increase overtime. There will be many files and/or folders that can be archived as they no longer need to be readily available (such as files that refer to a single year or event). There are two different ways to archive files within your file space, which one you choose will likely depend on the way you have set up your teams and respective channels.

Archive using annual folders

Within your various channels, you may have a year folder (e.g. 2021) which you can archive/hide and create a new one for the following calendar year. Note this method allows for swift and easy archiving but may require additional steps to complete to set up the next iteration. It is a good idea to delegate a staff member to maintain archiving where applicable.

💡 Keep an empty (template) folder hierarchy the General channel to easily re-create the folder structure for a new calendar year via SharePoint.

Archive within perpetual folder

Within your various channels, you may not want to re-create a new Annual folder together with all sub-folders within. In this case you would create 'archive' folders deeper within your folder system and archive within each KLA, content area or topic by term and year.

For example:

This shows how you would archive the content within a Stage 1 English folder by Term and Year.

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