Professional Development

Microsoft Training

Structure Teams through channels, tabs, files, and apps

Three takeaways: 

• Microsoft Teams can be used for professional groups or as groups for classes

•  It is easy to add and remove members in Teams, as well as muting certain conversations while others are still unmuted

• Other websites and apps are easily integrated into Teams

Get Started with OneNote

Three takeaways: 

• OneNote has different ways to sort content, like notebooks, pages, and subpages

• There are many options for writing using the digital pen in OneNote, with lots of color options and different tools like "Ink to Shape"

• Images, videos, and Microsoft forms can all be added to OneNote and used by people viewing them

Empower Educators to Explore the Potential of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the name for computers that can do tasks that require a level of intelligence that people thought could not be done by computers in the early days of computers and programming. AI is designed to learn and be able to adapt to tasks as needed. The newest type of AI that has become prominent is generative AI. This means that from the information the artificial intelligence has learned, it is able to generate new images or text based on what it has learned from its source material. A form of generative AI is a large language model, which uses lots of text that was fed into its learning model to comprehend and generate new text. In the training, it talks about PowerPoint Designer, which is a tool that recommends designs for slides in your slideshow based on what you have already put in. It is very helpful if you don't like how your slide looks and can't think of how to change it. Another tool the course talked about was CoPilot, which is Microsoft's large language model. I have used it to get a quick definition of something I didn't understand, as well as summarizing an article that I found so I could understand a topic on a base level. I placed the article into CoPilot, and it summarized it for me. AI can be connected to Domain 2, as it is good at maintaining purposeful environments by taking away tasks that make a teacher busy and giving them more time to think about their instruction. It can also be put under professional development, because learning to use these AI tools is new, but can be very helpful to a teacher.