IT Pros
Well, the first thing to understand is that we have so many resources available to help IT Pros between our core product documentation at successwithteams.com to the information on Teams University, which we talked about. There’s lots of opportunities for learning on their part, but also to remember that Teams isn’t just about meetings or OneNote. There’s a lot of other capabilities that you can bring in to support teachers, faculty, and other activities that are happening in the environment. And so I encourage people to take a phased approach and if we can bring back some of the project phasing that will help our teachers really learn differently so that they feel more capable of bringing this technology in to make a more robust digital learning experience. It’s all about engagement.
– Absolutely.
– All about engagement at this point.
– And I do wanna remind folks that although our physical stores are closed, our stores are still offering instructor-led and free training for schools and for companies that are looking for that. And you can get that as well. I got a great question, which I’m gonna ask you, is speech to text available for completing assignments remotely. And I know that we have speech to text both in Teams. We have it in Word or OneNote. So do you wanna take a moment and talk to it before I go to Jethro?
– Absolutely yes, as a matter of fact, it is. So speech to text is a great tool to use. As you’re thinking through an assignment, get that information into whatever app you happen to be using. Maybe you’re talking with other your teacher, other faculty in the course of completing your assignment, but you could also just be getting your thoughts down in OneNote or answering questions in Word and creating a paper. So absolutely use text to speech. You can always clean it up and make some adjustments by hand later if that’s what you wanna do. But I love that. I wish that it had been available when I was in school (laughs).
– All right, great. I use it in Outlook Mobile because sometimes typing on the smaller keyboard is difficult. And if it’s a longer email or I’m getting my thoughts out, I’ll just do that. Then you’re right. I’ll save it as a draft, go back quickly, edit it up. But if I’m in the car or something like that, it’s absolutely tremendous. Jethro over to you. Key things that folks wanna be thinking about now that they’re back into the school year.
Yeah, absolutely. And I kind of want to split it up into different audiences, right? So specifically for IT Pro, make sure that you go through the settings of your tenant, make sure that student safety is 100% your core focus. And if you’re missing out on some of the resources, I know that we’re sharing some of the resources immediately after this, but if and still if you wouldn’t be able to find them, premium Twitter happy to help you make sure that you have the right ones specifically for educators and also parents and organization really has to also make sure there’s professional development for them. We can’t just expect teachers to be dropped into Teams and know how everything works, especially with all the features that we have, like assignments, class notebook. A lot of teachers are already using some of the components, but bringing it all together and completely remotely is definitely an additional hurdle that they need to take. Also include parents, because parents will be our support service with our students. They’re the ones that are going to check, “Why can’t you join this meeting? Why can’t you do this?” So making sure that you involve the community, involve the parents is absolutely a great idea.
– Yeah, and I’ll offer this. If there is a school that can get a good amount of their teachers together, I am happy to do a free class for you and for your teachers. First come first serve, but I’m happy to jump on and do a 45 minute Q&A answer questions. And I know most of us Karuana as well, many of us would be willing to do that or can connect you with people who can. So if you’re like, “We just want somebody to come in and answer some for our teachers,” reach out to us, we will connect you with the right resources. And if we can’t, we’ll do it ourselves. We have our give month coming up. And that’s, my commitment is to do more of these things. So, I would love to help there. We’re gonna take another break. We’re gonna go to our unboxing, and then we’re gonna come back with our resources and talk about next week’s show. So sit tight, we’ll be right back.
– [Stephen] Welcome to our next, Unboxing. This week, we’re taking a look at the Dell XPS 17. So this is a beautiful laptop starting at 1399, really nice high-end metal finish. Other things I really like about it is two USB-C power ports on the right-hand side, plus a full-sized SD card slot and an Audio Jack. And on the other side, we have a lock and two more fully powered USB-C three Thunderbolt ports.
So let’s take a look, really, really amazing screen. I’m gonna go ahead and launch a video so you can get a good idea on what this looks like. And as you can see, a really key part of this is the screen. The resolution on this is 3840 x 2400. So that certainly tells you a lot about the type of display and the quality of this. This is a true 4K display, which is obviously great. I’m gonna go ahead and choose, repeat for a moment. So you can take a look at that. This comes with either a 10th generation i7 or i9 core. That’s a six or eight core and graphics card. This one has the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 with 6GB of Ram. You can also get the lower end versions with the 1650 Ti, that’s a 4GB card or the UHD graphics.
Let’s take a look at the specs on this. So if I go in, I click on properties, we can see this is a 64 Giga Ram. This is the i7 core on this. Drive space comes with anywhere from 256, all the way up to a full terabyte. Camera, one of the things I really, really like as they’ve moved the camera back up here to the top, rather than down at the bottom. So it’s not looking up your nose anymore. The camera is a 720P, 30 frames per second RGB IR camera with dual mics. What’s nice is you can either log in via Windows Hello, via the camera or via the fingerprint reader, built into the track, built into the keyboard. Bottom we can see we have a really, really nice large trackpad, which is great. I really love the size of this.
It takes up a good amount of room, but it really allows you to very, very simply and very, very easily switch between the different things that you need to switch between on this device. So backlit keyboard, of course. We have the killer control center, which allows you to switch between a multimedia gaming computer, how to optimize, or if you wanna go into a crater mode if you’re doing things like video Photoshop, et cetera, sets you up. And the Max Pro is built-in with four 3D audio. So this is great. It really allows if you’re listening to movies or doing things like that, for it to move from speaker to speaker, to side to side. And this a little heavy at 4.5 to 5.5 pounds. So it does weigh a little bit, but if you’re looking for a super-powerful laptop, something that is gonna match a MacBook Pro, but I have less of a price. This is a great laptop for you. This was Laptop Magazine’s editors’ choice, Tom’s Guide editor’s choice, and PC Magazine’s editor’s choice. So great device, check it out at dell.com, the Dell XPS 17.
I want to thank our guests this week and make sure that you check out all these links, the School Data Sync link, our Teams for Education, Adoption, Teams University, and of course, techgirlz.org. Just some great work that all these folks are doing to really help you. Somebody asked the question, how are you guys getting districts educated? Many are chasing Zoom and other tools because they don’t know that they have Microsoft Teams. We are shouting from the rooftops. We are putting out blogs. We are on social. We’re everywhere. So whatever you can do to help us to make people aware, that’s great. And we will take that back to our teams and let them know. Next week’s show, we’re gonna show some cool new Teams headsets from Bose and from Jabra. And we are focused on Microsoft Teams Security. So make sure to check out the website for upcoming show dates. Also, send me a post, or send me a photo or video of your setup on Twitter. And you can get maybe one of these cool Teams T-shirts. I will be picking a winner every week, follow me on Stephenlrose. And we have a new feature in our extras area. I’m gonna be adding a weekly tip or trick. So make sure that you check that out. So on behalf of myself and Jethro and Karuana, thanks so much for joining us, and we’ll see you on our next episode of Enabling Remote Work With Teams.