Microsoft & Azure Benefits¶

Notes for a teacher who happens to be a Microsoft employee. None of this is required — the entire curriculum runs on free public tools. This is about what's available if you want to use it.

Azure — what the class actually needs¶

Unit 4 hosts student web pages on Azure Static Web Apps. The curriculum site you're reading is hosted the same way.


Service	Azure Static Web Apps
Tier	Free
Expected cost	$0 — this workload sits comfortably inside the free tier
Account	Teacher's own subscription
Students	Never create accounts, see credentials, or open the portal

The hard rule for Unit 4

One Static Web App. One folder per student inside it. The teacher deploys; students hand over files.

Students never touch Azure. This isn't caution for its own sake — it's the difference between a school activity and a minor with access to a cloud billing account.

Two apps, not one¶

There are two separate Static Web Apps over the life of this class, and it's worth keeping them straight:

	Curriculum site	Unit 4 showcase
What it is	This site — lessons, handouts, resources	Student-built web pages
Resource group	`eca-coding-rg`	Create in spring, separate
Status	Live now	Built in Week 29
Contains student work	Never	Yes, reviewed before deploy

The "one Static Web App" rule above is about student pages: all of them go in one app, one folder each. It doesn't mean the class only ever has one app. Keeping the curriculum site and student work in separate apps means a mistake on one can't expose or break the other.

Docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/static-web-apps/

Cost control¶

Even on the free tier, set a budget alert on the subscription before Week 29. Not because this workload will cost anything, but because a misconfigured resource left running in April is a genuinely annoying way to discover Azure billing.

If your monthly credits are tied to a Visual Studio subscription, confirm the terms permit this use before you rely on it. A volunteer-taught school class is a benign use, but "confirm rather than assume" is the right instinct with anything billing-related.

Employee volunteer benefits worth knowing about¶

Microsoft's employee giving program matches volunteer hours with grants to eligible nonprofits. A Christian academy operating as a registered nonprofit is generally eligible.

This class is roughly 34 Fridays plus prep. At typical matching rates, that's a meaningful grant to the school — for something you were doing anyway.

What to do:

Check whether Eastwind is already registered in the giving portal
Log volunteer hours as you go, not in May. A running note in your phone is enough
Check whether prep time counts, not just classroom hours — policies vary, and prep is the larger number

This is the highest-leverage item on this page

Logging hours costs about thirty seconds a week and can fund the school's entire technology budget for a year. It is the single most valuable thing on this page, and it's the easiest to forget until it's too late to backfill.

If you want to fund hardware¶

Volunteer-hour grants are the natural funding path if you ever want a class set of micro:bits (~$15–20 each; a set of 10–15 covers a class working in pairs).

Deliberately not required by any lesson in this course. Physical computing is a genuinely great mixed-age activity — a 5th grader and a 10th grader are equally delighted when an LED lights up — but it's enrichment, and it would slot naturally into a flex week or replace part of Unit 3.

MakeCode already supports micro:bit at https://makecode.microbit.org, and students who did Unit 1 in MakeCode Arcade would need essentially no re-onboarding.

Microsoft TEALS¶

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/teals

You already know TEALS from three years of volunteering. Two things worth remembering in this context:

The near-peer and co-teaching models you learned there are exactly what this curriculum leans on for the mixed-age problem. See the teaching playbook.
TEALS is high-school-focused and classroom-partnership-based, so this resource class isn't a TEALS placement. But the pedagogy transfers directly, and the volunteer community is a good source of second opinions when a lesson isn't landing.

Other resources¶

Resource	Use	Link
Microsoft Learn	Short self-paced modules. Good for a 10th grader who wants more — offer, never assign	https://learn.microsoft.com/training/
MakeCode	Already the backbone of Units 1 and 3	https://www.microsoft.com/makecode
GitHub Education	Free tooling for verified students. Realistically 9th–10th grade only	https://education.github.com
Minecraft Education	A strong Week 17 (Hour of Code) option — but it needs an app install. Verify Chromebook policy allows it before planning around it	https://education.minecraft.net

Check Minecraft Education early if you want it

It requires a downloaded app rather than just a browser, and managed Chromebooks frequently block installs. If you want it for the December session, test it in October — not the week before.

Things to be careful about¶

Keep school and work separate. Use personal or clearly-designated resources for class material. Don't put student names, student work, or school data into work systems.

Don't create student accounts on anything without administration sign-off. Units 1 and 2 need none at all, which buys you until January to sort out any that are wanted later.

Student privacy in Unit 4 is the real one. Pages go on the public internet. No full names, no photos of students, no personal details, no school address. Review every page before it deploys. The Week 33 lesson covers this in detail — treat that section as non-negotiable rather than advisory.

Quick checklist¶

Confirm Azure subscription and credit terms permit this use
Set a budget alert before Week 29 (April)
Register Eastwind in the employee giving portal, if eligible
Start logging volunteer hours in August — including prep time
Test Minecraft Education on a school Chromebook by October, if you want it for Week 17
Decide by February whether to pursue micro:bits for a flex week