Starting the sharing process

The School has been trying to leverage OneNote and its sharing and syncing capabilities ever since OneNote was introduced in 2003 ... in a 1:1 tablet computer environment it's a natural fit for both teachers and students. Each page that is created can hold any kind of digital content and can be inked with as much freedom as a piece of paper. There is an organization that is familiar to those in education -- you start at pages, put pages into sections (I always think of those Hilroy separators) and then the sections into notebooks... except being digital there are no limitations (you can include audio, video, PDFs, etc) and the tablet doesn't increase in weight the more pages you add.

There have been difficulties with OneNote along the way -- although OneNote was capable of sharing a notebook between folks (so that more than one person could write on it at a time) and synchronize from a copy stored on a central server (so that you material could be in a central cloud and you would work on a copy) it never seemed to work right. Finally, though we've had a year of successful sync & share behind us... it looks like OneNote 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 are a match! It will mean that teachers will have full time access to each student's work and can provide commentary throughout. When it comes time to assess (either formatively or summatively) the student places it in a drop box, the teacher retrieves it, assesses it and places it in a read-only portfolio. A student's notebook is stored centrally so there's no concern should their laptop have a problem -- it's automatically restored when they re-sync. This is one small step towards a more collaborative and more differentiated classroom here at School. Feedback, as always, is welcome! Image

by gordonr

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Desmos, OneNote & Replay

So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it. They're collected at https://teacher.desmos.com/ But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough. It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss. Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue. Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page. From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working. I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's refr

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

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Making your own font

Slid in amongst all the announcements for Ignite, Microsoft's big conference in September, as a tool that I thought was quite cool. Not original, since similar things have existed elsewhere & when, but a nice option nevertheless. Microsoft's Font Maker allows you to create your own font using digital ink. You get all 26 characters, numbers and punctuation (for English languages) on which you draw your font for each character. (For me, it's the first 128 printable characters out of the ASCII table!) Using your #digitalink pen, you draw out what you want each character to look like. I just quickly wrote out the alphabet as you can see below: You don't have to do it all at once and you can keep working on your Font as you go; it saves as a JSON Project File which means you can send these between collaborators. Once you have your font done, you can adjust the spacing between characters & words to make it look good (it uses a scene from Hamlet -- I'

Continuous formation

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