This week Microsoft announced the release of five new features for Microsoft Teams for Education. The two of the more significant of the five new features are the ability to schedule assignment postings and the ability to give assignments to individual students or small groups.

Schedule assignment postings
Scheduling the posting of assignments is a feature that many teachers have wanted. Using this feature lets you write bunches of assignments at once and then schedule those assignments to appear on later dates.

Post individualized assignments
Posting assignments for individual students or small groups within your class lets you give variations of assignments tailored to your students’ needs. This feature will also be great for giving assignments to small groups within the context of a larger classroom project. For example, I would use this feature to give a different version of a current events article to each of five small groups to read and discuss before then sharing their discussion notes with the whole class.

Resubmission of assignments
Students can now resubmit their assignments after you have provided feedback.

Rich text editor for assignment instructions
This will let you add things like bolding, highlighting, and underlining text to your assignment instructions.

Celebrations
This feature will show your students a fun emoji or other animation when they submit an assignment.