Creating seminar groups in MS Teams using tags

MS Teams is a great platform to engage with students remotely, but how do you organise large groups of students?

One option is Channels. Each Team can have multiple channels, you may have noticed that Teams you are a member of will have a default “General” channel and more if the Teams owner has created additional ones.

So having a channel for each seminar group, for example, might sound like a good idea; “Seminar Group 1”, “Seminar Group 2” etc.

But you might want to keep Channels based on topics. For example, “Assignments” for discussions on coursework, or “Revision” for students to talk about revision materials. Keeping Channels focussed in this way will make it easier for you and your students to find relevant conversations and avoid duplicating work.

Consider using Tags to group students instead. You can create a tag for each seminar group, and when you want to bring something to their attention, you just type @ followed by the name of the tag. For example, if I created a tag for “Seminar Group 1”, I can type into Teams @Seminar Group 1, and each of the students in that group would be notified of my message. This works just like when you Mention a specific individual or Channel.

Creating tags is easy, if you are the owner of the team. Either open the Team you want to create the tag for, or from your Teams tab, click the ellipses next to the Team name.

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Click Manage Tags from the dropdown menu.

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Click Create Tag.

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Give the tag a name, this will be the name you use when you want to use the tag, so keep it simple and clear. Type in the names of all the students you want to add to the tag. Click Create.

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And that’s it! Now, if you want to contact a specific group of students, or bring their attention to something in particular, just mention their tag.