ONLYOFFICE tips&tricks for educators: Part 2. Collaboration platform

15 April 2020By Nadya

In this post, we have assembled some tips&tricks for educators to ease the remote teaching process. In our previous article, we were talking about working with docs in ONLYOFFICE. In this one, we’ll focus on our collaboration platform.

Tip 1. Get ONLYOFFICE cloud for free

ONLYOFFICE cloud includes online document editors and a collaboration platform with projects, mail, calendar, internal social network, and a messenger app called Talk. It is free for schools, a 50% discount is offered to higher education.

To get your free cloud, fill in this form.

Tip 2. Invite your students to collaborate in the cloud

To communicate with your students, you’ll need to add them to your portal as users or guests, depending on the access rights you are planning to give them.

Users can create their own content in ONLYOFFICE.
Guests can only view content.

The easiest way to invite people to ONLYOFFICE is to create an invitation link. Go to the People module and click Invite users to portal on the left panel. Copy the invitation link and send it to your students.

NB: you can also add your students manually or import your contacts from Yahoo/Google account or CSV file.

We recommend organizing your students in groups, this way it will more convenient to message them and assign the tasks.

Learn more about adding users and creating user groups in our Help Center.

Tip 3. Structure your learning materials in Documents

You can store all the learning materials (including office docs and media files) in the ONLYOFFICE Documents module.

It’s a great idea to organize your files creating special folders for different classes/workgroups before sharing them with students. If you don’t want your students to change these files, grant them Read-Only permission.

Create a special folder for uploading your students’ homework for you to check. Don’t forget to explain that these homeworks should be shared with the teacher, not with everyone. You can assess homework files using the ONLYOFFICE document editor that has reviewing and commenting features.

Learn more about working with documents in ONLYOFFICE in this article.

Tip 4. Use Calendar to create timetables

Use ONLYOFFICE Calendar to schedule your classes/seminars and send invitations to your students. They will get the invitations via email. Once they accept the invitation, the information about your class will be saved to their personal calendars.

Apart from time and place of your class (haha, place, we mean your conferencing tool), you can include a detailed description to which you can add any information that your students need to know before the class begins – the books they need by their side, tasks that must be completed and so on.

Some other ideas on how to use ONLYOFFICE calendars:

create your own to-do list,
set the day of the final test and send the invitation to your students so that they see how much time they have left to prepare,
never forget about your students’ birthdays.

More about using ONLYOFFICE Calendar in our Help Center.

Bonus tip: Use the Projects module to plan educational activities. Your students can also use this functionality to work on their group projects. Learn more

Tip 5. Create an internal social network for your class

The ONLYOFFICE Community module offers you a complete toolset for building an internal social network. It may be a good idea to create one during these self-isolating times.

Blogs. Make your students create their blogs and share their remote learning experience or maybe keep their reading journals. You can also use blogs to make announcements.
Forums. This is a good place to discuss remote learning issues with your students. They also can discuss your assignments and help each other or plan the prom, maybe?
Wiki. If there’s a need to share some common knowledge like essay requirements, reading lists, etc, here’s the tool!
Bookmarks. Share links that you find useful for your students.
Talk. This is the instant messenger to quickly communicate with your class. The students can also use it to chat with each other.
Polls. Your students’ feedback is always important, right?

Read more about the Community module in our Help Center.