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By Karthik Mudaliar · Posted
Microsoft adds new AI study and teaching tools for free to Microsoft 365 Education by Karthik Mudaliar Microsoft is expanding its footprint into the classroom with a new suite of AI-powered study and teaching tools for Microsoft 365 Education. Rather than pushing these features as premium add-ons, the company is rolling out many core features at no additional cost to existing customers. The update brings new tools such as 'Copilot Notebooks' and 'Study and Learn Agents' into Microsoft's Education suite. Copilot Notebooks is essentially an AI-powered workspace where students can ground answers with their own learning materials, similar to Google's NotebookLM. The study and learning agents would allow students to learn concepts more visually, along with interactive practices and real-time feedback. For the last few years, educational institutions have struggled to implement practical guardrails for the usage of large language models. The new tools from Microsoft are a push towards providing those guardrails natively within the apps that the students and teachers already use every day. For teachers, the new 'Unit Plans' within the dedicated 'Teach' agent would allow them to rapidly generate structured curriculum frameworks grounded in established learning science, cutting down hours of preliminary lesson planning. Microsoft is also introducing 'Learning Groups' in Assignments that would help educators automatically categorize students based on performance data. With 'Learning Zones', teachers can then tailor assignments to different comprehension levels. It should be noted that Microsoft is making Learning Zone accessible for a one-year trial across all Windows 11 devices, while quietly incentivizing school districts to upgrade their legacy hardware and lock further into the Windows ecosystem. Of course, Microsoft is doing this as part of a broader ambition. Just last year, the company made waves when it brought its 365 Copilot to the education sector for $18 a month, introducing premium tiers with standalone conversational agents. However, gating all AI features behind a per-user subscription left a massive gap of students without access to official, school-sanctioned AI tools. Now that the features are inside the base Microsoft 365 Education suite for free, the company is effectively subsidizing the AI training of its next generation of power users. Microsoft’s own data, released alongside these tools in its 2026 AI in Education Report, indicates that while over 90% of students are using AI, nearly 80% lack formal training. Lastly, Microsoft is also expanding its "Elevate for Educators" training program, developed in partnership with organizations like ISTE and ASCD. This ensures that the teachers tasked with policing and guiding this new technology actually understand how to use it themselves. -
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By Arceles · Posted
Mexicans do not like their spices to be used in crap. Also their food is quite delicious. -
By thartist · Posted
Nah. It has/had it's quirks that are either usual for every Windows version or a non-issue, like its easily bypassable requirements, raw launch state, broken updates and inclusion of AI, but past that, it's received tons of improvements especially in the last couple years, and we're now looking forward to 26H2 and the K2 program with a ton of QoL improvements, so it's clearly upwards.
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