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Showing posts from November, 2014

Lync in a Snowstorm: Video-conferencing the Music Classroom

Okay, so it's not Buffalo, but one of our teachers lives out in the country and due to the recent snowstorm was unable to come to school.  Normally, that isn't a great emergency as we do our own coverages for missing teachers internally so students tend to get a teacher who can keep them moving in their subject areas. But I was chatting with our snow-bound music teacher while she was at home and she was worried about one of her classes that she wanted to touch base with.   I mentioned that it wouldn't be a problem to quickly throw together a Lync video-conference with her students and I'd be happy to do the physical setup at the school end. So she went to Outlook and created a Lync meeting -- it's easy if you've ever made an appointment in Outlook... click the NEW LYNC MEETING in the toolbar and it creates a conference room that everyone is invited to.  Although you set a time, it exists as soon and as long as someone logs in. So, she sent the Invitation

"You don't want to use OneNote; it's too hard..."

So I was sitting in the Faculty Lounge yesterday (as I am as much as I can... see It's too far ...) and I was chatting with a Social Studies teacher.  She was asking about the Microsoft conference I had attended last week where I had the opportunity to share our story with folks from across the Americas.  She wanted to make sure I knew that she was thrilled with the OneNote Binder (our super-charged version of Microsoft's OneNote Class Notebook ).  And then she said You know, when I first came to our school I noticed some math & science teachers using OneNote and asked about it in my department and was told by my colleagues 'You don't want to use OneNote, it's too hard' . I, of course, cringed.  But then I asked her why she changed her mind and was now a big fan of OneNote. She said I went on maternity leave [the year we introduced the Binder] and when I came back, everyone was using the OneNote Binder and it was just so easy!  I noticed how one of o