Illustrated emotions help students in Microsoft Teams

Illustrated characters from Microsoft help students share their emotions with teachers.

What you need to know

• Microsoft Teams will add illustrated emotions later this month.
• The emotions will be within Reflect for Microsoft Teams.
• The purpose of the position is to help students express themselves to teachers.

Microsoft will soon be launching a feature for Microsoft Teams that will allow students to share their emotions with teachers in a new way. Later this month, Microsoft will introduce 51 illustrated characters within Reflect in Microsoft Teams. These characters are intended to expand students’ emotional vocabulary and help students associate words for emotions with facial expressions.

Reflect in Microsoft Teams was launched earlier this year. It helps students express themselves in different ways. It supports polls to help teachers gather information and insight from students while building relationships. Teachers can also view non-numeric data to better understand their students’ emotional well-being and their classroom ecosystem.

An education blog post shares insights about the importance of interacting with students. Here are the preliminary insights Microsoft shared:

• School performance: Students’ social and emotional skills are important predictors of school grades across backgrounds, age groups and cities.
• Psychological well-being: Fifteen-year-old girls and socio-economically disadvantaged students indicated that they are less satisfied with their lives than boys and socio-economically disadvantaged students, respectively.
• Curiosity and creativity: The study found that levels of creativity and curiosity were significantly lower in 15-year-olds than 10-year-olds, indicating a decline in creativity as children enter adolescence.
• Social relations in schools: Students with a greater sense of belonging to the school and better relations with teachers reported higher social and emotional skills.
• Individual differences in socioeconomic status: On average, socioeconomically advantaged students reported higher social and emotional skills than their socioeconomically disadvantaged peers in all cities participating in the study.

Reflect in Microsoft Teams helps educators engage with students in a variety of ways, including sharing feedback and encouragement. The new illustrated emotions add another method of communication for teachers and students. Because people differ in the way they express themselves, one student may find illustrations a more effective way to communicate, while another may prefer a poll.

Source: windows central