I’m sure we all remember in 2020, when school was out for half the year, and we all had to use Microsoft Teams for video calls, messaging and attending classes. Even when school was back to in-person, Microsoft Teams was still being used very frequently.

Microsoft Teams is an app that came out in 2017; it’s an app that’s free and you can communicate with your entire district with it. Teams Chat is not limited to only chatting and you can video call on it, too. Students used it to communicate with teachers, message friends, get answers for homework, attend classes and more. It was a fun time, and it made dealing with the pandemic that much easier.

However, teachers and students have been pulling away from using the app and expressing dislike for the app. I have met many teachers that refuse to use Teams, and that would rather use quite literally anything other than Teams, like email, Schoology, etc. However, there’s still some teachers and students that use Teams Chat regularly for communication.

Microsoft Teams has been being used less and less as time goes on. People are led to believe that the app will stop being used all together, and move on to newer technologies.

“I think less and less kids will use it,” teacher Clayton Sumner said. “I have about three to four kids that still message me on there, but they’re from my COVID-19 class.”

With Teams giving students and teachers the free will to message anybody in the district, there was bound to be incidents of misuse of the app that lead to the app’s chat feature to be removed for a couple months.

“There was a lot of inappropriate things going on,” principal Tim Youngblood said, “that led to the removal of the chat feature district wide.”

When the chat feature got removed, students were very upset that they couldn’t message their friends or teachers anymore and they couldn’t ask for help on any assignments.

Students didn’t realize that teachers and administrators could see every message they sent, and that led to many suspensions and phone calls to unhappy parents.

When you go on Microsoft Teams nowadays, all of the people that you might have used to text all have ‘offline’ next to their name. These students haven’t been on Teams for months, everyone used to be online 24/7.

The only way Microsoft Teams will ever have another comeback is if another pandemic happens like COVID-19, where going to school in person is no longer an option, and online school is the last resort, or if most teachers make a decision to include Teams in their classes.

With students abusing the app, teachers disliking using the app, and no one even thinking about Teams anymore, I think it’s safe to say that Teams will not make a comeback, and people won’t all of the sudden start using it again for no good reason. Microsoft Teams was an excellent app, it gave all of us some good or some bad memories, but regardless, it gave us memories.

Without Microsoft Teams, I don’t know how we would’ve survived the pandemic. Teams helped all of us make friends, talk to teachers, do assignments and attend classes. Teams was definitely a staple in our 2020 pandemic experience, and we all will never forget the memories we had.