Q: How do I see where my Teams meetings are?
A: There are a couple of ways to get to your meetings. If your meeting has been scheduled as a meeting on your student’s Outlook calendar, you can find the meeting in their Teams calendar, located in the far left navigation bar. Once you are in the calendar, all of the classes should be accessible via the "join" button that you can see by hovering each class. If you don’t see the calendar, restart Teams, that often will cause it to appear. You also can use the Outlook calendar, which is located in the bottom left of your outlook interface. There is a small envelope icon, and a calendar icon. By default, you’re in the mail interface, or the envelope. If you click on the other icon, the calendar icon, you will toggle to the calendar view.
Your student may have virtual classes scheduled that are not set up as meetings in Teams. For those meetings, please use the link that the teacher sent to join. If you would like all of your student’s meetings to be visible in Teams, you can create their own appointment in their Teams calendar and add the link the teacher sent.

Q: What about asynchronous learning, how do I see what they need to do?
A: It varies by grade. Grades K-2 are using Seesaw for their class assignments. You will see them in the main menu area that appears when you first enter into Seesaw. You can also locate their assignments on the right-hand side of the interface, there are three icons, one of them is a "to do" icon. That will filter their tasks.
For grades 3-5, you will use Schoology to see your assignment list, it is located in "courses" on the top menu when you enter into your class area on Schoology. Most teachers have broken out their assignments by week, you can find the daily assignments in there. Most of the assignments online are completed in Seesaw as well for the upper grades.

Q: What is Clever?
A: Clever compiles links for many of the platforms your student will need to access school resources. In Clever, you can get to Seesaw, Schoology, Office365, as well as a number of additional learning resources that SPS has made available to the community, such as Libby, Tumblebooks, Freckle, and more! You can locate Clever in the Start Menu Located in the bottom left corner on your laptop, or on your iPad, you can get to Clever in the SPS Portal.

Q: How do I get to my kid’s email?
A: SPS laptops are pre-loaded with a shortcut to their email on their desktop. If you are on other devices, including the SPS iPad, you can get to their email via Clever, by clicking on the Microsoft 365 link. If at any point, you are prompted to log into their email, you can do so by using their email address (1+firstinitial+middleinitial+lastname@seattleschools.org) and their password which is their birthdate (MMDD or YYYYDD). There are some other naming conventions that some kids have (some kids don’t have a middle name, for example, among other reasons), a common alternative convention is the first two letters of their first name+last name. If this still doesn’t work, contact Ms. Bastasch or their teacher to reset their password and confirm their email / login. You can also find your student’s SPS email address on The Source (https://ps.seattleschools.org/public/home.html) by logging in with your Parent/Guardian account.

Q: My kid’s laptop or device is slow. What can I do to improve that?
A: The district is continually pushing out updates, so it is a best practice to shut down the machines each night, and fire them up in the morning. Let them charge overnight. However, if the performance is still lagging noticeably, after school do a restart and then leave their device running, and plugged in (being plugged in is critical). Leave the device for about an hour, and then do another restart. If you do this a couple of times, it should improve the performance because you have probably cycled through any updates that have been waiting in the background to run. We have noticed that updates running in the background are not the only reason for slowness, hardware or connectivity can also be the issue. If this continues, please reach out to your class tech parents and Ms. Bastach and they will help to assess, see if we can provide any additional network troubleshooting, or determine whether it needs to be escalated to SPS Tech Support.

Q: The teams meeting chat has a bunch of notification popups, how do I remove them?
A: When you are not in the meeting (this has to be done outside of the call) go into the settings for the account, located in the top right where their profile bubble is. There will be a dropdown menu when you click on that bubble, and the settings “gear” icon is there. Open that, and go into notifications. You will see that everything is set to a default of “Banner” or “Banner and Email”. Change all of those settings to “off” or “only show in feed.”

Q: What is allowed in the chat area of Teams?
A: It is important to think of Teams chat, especially for the class meetings, as if they were in a classroom. All chats are archived so that kids can reference them at a later time. For that reason it is important to keep the chat area free from “chatter” within the meetings chat archive, even after the class has ended. Chat within teams should is to be reserved for learning as directed by the teacher. We are not allowing side chats between students that are not supervised or supported by staff in a small breakout room with scaffolding and structure. Please coach your student in using chat for educational purposes only.

Q: Is there any method for them to interact with their friends via SPS systems?
A: While many families are using social platforms, we realize that there is a need to interact socially with their peers in school, and not everyone is on social media or able to use those other platforms. Small social groups will be starting with Ms. Bastasch and volunteers soon. Please be sure to fill out the survey if you'd like to be included: Greenwood School Survey. Online, it is advised that kids can feel free to socialize with their friends using their email (Outlook), and keep up their social ties there, if they like, and if their parents approve. Social chatting within Teams (chatting 1:1) is not allowed at this time and while this function is not blocked, we are asking that it not be used at this time, instead reserving all Teams chat functions for in-class only interactions. If you have questions regarding this, please reach out to your teacher to discuss.

Q: How do I make the teacher the largest window on the Teams call?
A: You can pin the teacher by hovering over their window in the meeting gallery. Tap the application menu (three vertical dots), and will give you the option to pin the teacher as the main/largest window.
Slight word of caution: sometimes pinning the teacher or student leader to make their image larger will make it hard for students to see what is being presented (if the teacher is presenting something). If this is the case, you can unpin them using the same method, and it should revert to whatever view is being utilized by the teacher. On iPad, there is an option to pin users in the participant list, which you can access by tapping the icon in the upper right that looks like people.

Q: What do I do if an application (Seesaw, Teams, etc.) isn’t working right?
Step 1: Close and restart the application (to close an app on iPad, double-click the “Home” button, then swipe the application away that you want to close)
Step 2: Shut down and restart the device (to shut down an iPad, press and hold the top button until a “slide to turn off” slider appears, and then use the slider to turn off)
Step 3: Contact your class tech volunteer.