Exactly what did they do to disturb a virtual class? Glad to hear the students worked together to clear things up. My eldest really likes her virtual classes now, I think having those daily sessions helps for their socializing. I'm a bit worried about my younger one though, because their social development is just beginning.
Thankfully my kids' school has been very good about updating logins and passwords. We haven't had any disturbances in their virtual classrooms.
Microsoft Teams (our installation at least) is preset to make each attendee of a MeetUp a "speaker"/"presenter" - sorry, I honestly don't know what the actual terminology in English looks like, our software uses a German UI -, which means that students can:
a) kick other students out of the channel,
b) mute other students,
c) demote other students (see below),
d) mute teachers,
e) invite outsiders to join a MeetUp,
f) use the file upload feature.
There's a simple solution for stopping such nonsense (in fact, there are several, but this is the most "impromptu" one you can use at all times, without any further precautions): Whenever a student joins the channel, "demote" her or him to "participant"/"member"/whatever. They keep their right to speak, but can't interfere with the workings of the channel or other participants. They can't change their status by themselves after that, not even by leaving the channel and rejoining.
Now, one of my students invited outsiders (e) who were then capable of inviting others (e again), which they did. Some of those went on to ask off-topic questions, mute other students (b), mute the teacher (d) and, when challenged by some of my students, started to demote those (c) in order for them to be able to keep the disruptions going.
Unfortunately, my colleague wasn't aware of the solution described above (which, to a degree, is her own fault - I myself documented the solution a couple of weeks ago for all to see after something similar, though much less disruptive had happened in one of my MeetUps).
Had this happened to me, I'd have had the perpetrators cry "uncle" in three minutes (at the latest) while at the same time documenting the whole thing (screenshots), including all names, and I'd also have let them know they were screwed, and than I'd have phoned their principal within the next quarter of an hour, with all the facts and names sent over in a neat little package afterwards. All over in an hour (not the aftermath, though). But then, I handled unruly chat rooms already thirty years ago, with dozens of members of - truely! - all sorts ... though, to be fair, IRC offers much more sophisticated tools than Teams - you can't easily ban and de-voice people in Teams after they got invited, for instance, and in IRC, keeping open twelve channels and chats doesn't really wear you down, whereas the constant click-n-jump routine in Teams is a pain in the behind because it's so tedious and slow ... keeping up more than four parallel conversations is unthinkable.
The fact that outsiders came in (breach of trust and privacy protection) and then disrupted everything (severe disciplinary issues) made all this quite an ominous case, really. But we did our best to get the students (all of them) on our side - and all but the worst offenders have come forward and cooperated. The two who did the most damage and now are stubborn - will suffer heavy consequences (others, like my student, will feel it, too, but far less harshly because they helped right the wrongs).
M.