Social Squared Customer Story - Education Sector
Lightning Tools Social Squared has helped many education organizations such as schools, colleges and universities to improve communication between students and teachers.
ocial Squared has helped many organizations build discussion boards within Microsoft SharePoint for almost a decade and across many different types of business. We decided to evolve all of our products to work within Microsoft Teams channels throughout 2019 which included Social Squared. Initially, we (and our customers) questioned why you might want a social tool within a social tool! However, Social Squared offers specifically “Discussion Board functionality” which is just not available within Teams out of the box.
The lack of Discussion Board functionality has become widely recognised within the education space. The demand for Social Squared has increased dramatically throughout the pandemic and especially in the education space where the learning has become remote at many schools, colleges and universities.
Microsoft Teams by itself offers so much to the education space, and has helped remote classes take place through Teams meetings, and communication to take place in the Teams Channels via the Posts tab. Files can be shared within the Files tab which of course is another benefit.
Social Squared complements the Microsoft Teams experience by offering Discussion Board functionality within Teams channels. What sets Discussion Boards (Social Squared) apart from the Posts tab is the structure. Forum Groups and Forums provide a categorization to discussion topics which makes it easy to navigate to discussions, questions and announcements that are related to a specific class, or module within the learning space.
Teachers can be made moderators of such forums which provides them the ability to post class discussions, moderate the replies, and mark student responses as featured or answered. With the added benefit of Microsoft 365 integration, it’s easy to manage access to the forums. Team members can be added to Microsoft Teams, and those members will immediately have access to Social Squared either by the Desktop, Browser or Mobile App.
This structure has helped many schools and colleges, but also other educational environments within other types of business.
Social Squared provides my students with the platform for coding discussions. We have created Forum Groups and Forums around the modules that we teach which include Python Programming and Transact SQL. With Social Squared, the posts allow for code insertion and formatting which is a great feature! My students benefit from engagement with each other, and allows them to communicate with me outside of the classroom environment should they have questions. This benefits the other students as well who can view the questions and the verified answers.