Share files and resources with your class

- [Instructor] One of my favorite features in Microsoft Teams is the ability to create, upload, curate, and share files and resources with your students, and it's extremely simple. Let's take a look at how we can do this. Inside of my Biology 101 course, I'm going to make sure I'm in the General channel and then up at the top I want to select the Files tab. Notice there are a couple files in here, and this is because I uploaded them earlier in the course in order to add them as tabs. So we had that syllabus as well as a collaboration PowerPoint.

Now I can add resources in a couple different ways. First, I can upload them from my computer or from my OneDrive account, so I'm going to click here on Upload, and on my desktop I'm going to upload this Webb's Depth of Knowledge PDF. I'll double-click on that. As you can see it's uploading here, and then it will add it to my files. So there it is right there. Now you also have the ability to create new resources directly inside of Teams. I'll go ahead and do this.

I'm going to go to the far left and click on New, and this asks if I want to create a folder, which I highly recommend for organizing different things in your class, but you can also open a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, and PowerPoint presentation. Now, this is a great way for students to collaborate or for you to create things that you can share with your students. Let's say for instance that I want to create a Word document. I'll title it here, Genetics Introduction, and click Create. It will then open up Microsoft Word Online, so there is an online version of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that is similar to Google Docs in that you can create it, it saves automatically and then you're able to share it with your class.

So just like that I'm able to create a new document or a new resource inside of my files in Microsoft Teams. Now if I switch back here, I also have one other option, and that is, on the right-hand side I can add cloud storage. As long as this feature is enabled by your site admins, you'll be able to do this. If I click here it allows you to add folders from SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, ShareFile, as well as Google Drive, so this is pretty impressive. You can share a folder directly from there, include it in your files and allow you and your students to access it inside of Microsoft Teams.

Now once these resources are added to that channel you'll be able to incorporate them into assignments, into discussions and conversations, as well as other things. You can make them into tabs, which we did earlier, and more. So, there's other things that you can do such as open them in SharePoint. If I clicked here, I can open that in a SharePoint site, if I click on the three dots icon to the far right of any one of these resources, let's say for instance my syllabus, I'll go to that far right, click here, I get a drop-down menu that allows me to do other things.

I could open this online, open in SharePoint, I can move it, copy it, download it, delete it, rename it, I can get a link that I can share it with, or make it as a tab that will appear up at the top. One important thing to note is that these files are specific to the channel that they're added to. If you add it to your General channel you're sharing it with the main channel for the class. If I navigate to another channel however, you'll notice that it has its own Files section, which is nice because it doesn't clutter up the class files with files only relative to specific groups.

So, each file section will be particular to the channel that it is created in.