Sharing your Screen Content in Microsoft Teams

Sharing content during Microsoft Teams meetings is a great way to engage and collaborate with participants. This guide will walk you through the process of sharing your screen, using PowerPoint Live, and sharing computer audio effectively.

Sharing your Screen

This feature allows you to display content and applications open on your computer in real-time.

It is ideal for demonstrating discipline-specific software, webpages and content stored on your device, or PowerPoints that contain a range of complex embedded content such as embedded Poll Everywhere activities.

This is the most simple option; this way you know that if the content is visible on your screen to you as the presenter, it is also visible to your students. Ensure that you close any applications that should not be shown to students such as your Microsoft Outlook emails.

PowerPoint ‘Live‘

PowerPoint Live is designed for sharing PowerPoint presentations during your meeting, however it affords additional functionality to both you as the instructor and your attendees without needing to exit Microsoft Teams.

Importantly, it keeps everything within the single Microsoft Teams page, therefore you can control your presentation, view presenter notes, using inking and annotation tools whilst staying engaged with your participants, seeing people’s video, raised hands, reactions, and chatting.

When using PowerPoint Live, your attendees can move the presentation forwards or backwards as required (visible only to the individual and not the whole meeting) for example if they need to recap on a slide that you have since moved on from.

If you wish to disable this function in the Microsoft Teams toolbar at the top of the interface, you will see an ‘eye’ icon labelled ‘private view’, select this to prevent attendees from looking through the slides.

Sharing your Computer Audio

When sharing your Screen in Microsoft Teams you may also need to your computer audio. For example if you are playing a video clip in your Presentation or on a website such as Panopto, or if you are demonstrating a piece of discipline-specific software such as when demonstrating a piece of video editing software.

To share computer audio while sharing your screen or PowerPoint presentation, follow these steps:

1. When you click the ‘Share’ button, before selecting to share your screen, enable the option labelled ‘Include computer sound’ in the sharing options window.