Skip to main content

Lync, redux

Well, there's been some great outcomes from the Lync PD last week.

I had a social group that's planning dinner events ask how to use Lync so that they can meet without having to be physically together -- in the past, they've had to meet several times throughout the day to ensure that all the participants are aware of what's going on.  They can videorecord their meeting for folks who are absent and use it as an archive of their plans.  And, of course, using doodle.com to help them schedule when these Lync meetings are going to happen.

In Outlook, next to a user's name is a small box.
If it shows green, you can right-click it
and start a conversation

The Languages department has been particularly interested.  I'm going to be showing the French students how to use Lync (in French) to engage in video conversations (in French) and record them for later revision and reflection.  Lync has video recording of conversations built-in, which is an important capability that's not in Skype.  It is Google+ Hangouts using YouTube but there a number of issues around YouTube that doesn't make it as popular with teachers, students and parents.

And the Arabic teacher is planning on using Lync to converse with native speakers in Jordan.  Since the students are 8 hours difference, our students and theirs will talk after-hours and record the conversation for viewing in class.

On each class' site, students
can see teachers' Lync availability

The faculty are becoming accustomed to using Lync as both a synchronous and asynchronous communication medium with me (and others)... many of our internet resources like Outlook and our LMS show a user's availability so they are feeling more free to contact me if they see the little green box that means I'm open to conversation.  And if I'm not around or doing something else, it "saves" it to my mailbox so I can continue the conversation later.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
14 comments
Read more

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

Taking a brief break from my "Getting Started with OneNote Class Notebook" series (you can start that one here )... This is a little advanced so if you're not comfortable setting permissions inside of Office365 you may want to avoid this.  Or set up a Class Notebook to play with so that it doesn't affect any existing Class Notebooks.  Yeah, the latter is a good option. One of the great powers of OneNote is that you can do some really neat permissioning of the Section Tabs. When the Notebook is created, of course, it gives you an "open permissions" on the Collaboration Space and student-read-only on the Content Library.  And then each student space is wide open to each individual student. But we've found that occasionally you want to mix up the permissions a little.  For example, you could create a space in a student section for your private notes that the student couldn't see, or maybe you want a tab in the Collaboration Space that students cou
39 comments
Read more

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'
Post a Comment
Read more