Microsoft Teams – Safeguarding Measures
With more and more schools moving over to Microsoft Teams for remote learning in light of COVID-19, safeguarding is very important when students are using Teams.
With this in mind, we highly recommend implementing Team’s policies on your office 365 to safeguard your students.
Implement a policy to block students creating their own teams.
As standard, all users including students can create their own Microsoft Teams. We find that students love to create their own Teams so they can invite their friends and have a chat without the school’s knowledge. This of course can be fun for the students but can also be used for inappropriate chats or content.
What can be done?
There is something that can be done and SBS recommend that a block be placed on the creation of Microsoft Teams so that only requested users within the school have the power to create teams that are needed by the school. This can be achieved by your ICT Support using a PowerShell script on your Office 365 Tenant.
How do you do this?
To implement this your ICT Support will need to create a security group on Office 365. This will have all the users that need to create teams in it, all other users will be blocked from creating Microsoft Teams.
Then a PowerShell Script will need to be run to tell your Office 365 Tenant. You want to implement this.
Your ICT will be able to follow this Microsoft document to complete the task. Microsoft Guidance >
Has a student created their own Microsoft Teams already?
It may be the case that students have created their own Teams already and you will need to locate these and have them deleted. This can all be done in the Teams Admin Portal on Office 365. Within here you can see all the Teams that have been created, who is the owner/creator of the Team and who is a member of the Team. From here you can select the Team and just delete it. This will remove it from Office 365 and from the student's Teams account.
Implement Microsoft Education Policies
Microsoft have created some pre-made polices within the Team Admin console that can be linked to a student account. Adding these polices to a Student account will stop them from doing many things within teams. Here are a few examples of what the policies can do:
- Messaging – Control who can use the chat, edit chats, delete messages
- Meetings – Set policies on video, content sharing, recording and guest access
- Calling – Decide if students can call each other
- Prevent them from adding or removing group members
Microsoft eDiscovery
eDiscovery enables users to review content found in your Microsoft cloud estate. This can be used for safeguarding; administrators can search for certain words and eDiscovery will find that data. There may be times where a request has come in asking for all correspondence in relation to a specific teacher or student, or where certain words need to be checked for to see if they have been communicated within groups or to individuals.
You can be reassured that compliance and security is at the heart of all Microsoft cloud platforms, especially with their education customers in mind. While Microsoft wants to help teachers effectively deliver online lessons, they want to safeguard students at the same time.
Advice - how can SBS help?
I hope you have found this information useful. If you require any help or support in implementing this, please contact SBS and we will be happy to help on 0345 222 1551 • Option 1 or email ICTservicedesk@schoolbusinessservices.co.uk
