How to determine the difference and advantage of Teams for Education vs. Teams?

Hi @Rosanna Zeismer,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

Thank you for reaching out with your question regarding Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams for Education. I appreciate the opportunity to clarify the distinctions and help guide your decision.

This is a great topic, and I’d love to contribute my findings to this thread in hopes that the information below will be helpful to you and others exploring similar questions. Hopefully, it will provide clarity and assist you in making an informed decision. I also encourage others to share their experiences and insights so that this discussion can grow into a helpful resource for everyone.

According to this article from Microsoft:

Choose a team type to collaborate in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Support [49d9-2914-1f3-c03b], there are four team types available in Teams for Education, each serving a distinct purpose:

• Class: Designed for teachers and students to collaborate on assignments, discussions, and learning activities. It includes features like Assignments, Grades, and Class Notebook.
• Professional Learning Community (PLC): Intended for educators to share resources, best practices, and collaborate on professional development.
• Staff: Built for school administration and staff collaboration, with tools for managing internal operations and communications.
• Other: Flexible option for clubs, extracurricular groups, or general collaboration outside of classroom or staff needs.

These team types are not available in the standard version of Microsoft Teams, which is primarily designed for business collaboration. Standard Teams focuses on meetings, chat, and file sharing, but does not include education-specific workflows.

So, if your teaching requires structured classroom management, assignment workflows, grading, and compliance with education standards, then switching to Teams for Education is strongly recommended. However, if your current use of standard Teams is limited to video meetings, chat, and file sharing, you may choose to continue with standard Teams until a natural break in the academic calendar to avoid disruption.

For further details, you may refer to:

• Microsoft Teams for Education Overview
• Choose a team type to collaborate in Microsoft Teams

For a deeper comparison between Teams for Business and Teams for Education, you can also review this article:

Note: Microsoft is providing this information as a convenience to you. The site is not controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft cannot make any representations regarding the quality, safety, or suitability of any software or information found there. Please make sure that you completely understand the risk before retrieving any suggestions from the below link:

Microsoft Teams for Business vs Microsoft Teams for Education – ENow Software

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