Microsoft 365 as a Tool for Teaching During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Perceptions of Portuguese Teachers of Basic and Secondary Education

Abstract

In the last year, and largely due to the pandemic situation of COVID-19, teachers experimented with technology in an innovative way not only to keep students engaged, but also to make learning more active and more significant. The Microsoft 365 was one of the solutions that provided schools, teachers and students with all the necessary resources to continue teaching and learning in a remote mode. In this work, we present a study that aims to know the opinions of several teachers about the use they made of Microsoft 365 during distance education and to know the degree of satisfaction obtained with its use. The adopted method has a descriptive and exploratory nature, focusing on a quantitative paradigm. The study participants were 101 teachers of basic1 and secondary education2 from schools in Northern Portugal. A questionnaire survey was used as a data collection instrument, which was mainly disseminated by email from Outlook. Data analysis was performed using Excel (Office 2016). The results suggest that Microsoft 365 was the appropriate response to the constraints imposed by the pandemic, and that most respondents revealed a high level of satisfaction with its use, despite not having much training in the use of teaching platforms.