"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 our teachers had all of his resources organized for the entire year but could still add breaking news and adapt his instruction throughout the year. I could see all the students' materials and provide feedback really easily.

I asked her, how long did it take you to get used to the OneNote Binder. She smiled (that raised my spirits) and said It was just so obvious that in seconds I realized how it worked.

A photo from Microsoft's "Dragon's Den" in Barcelona March 2014,
where we unsuccessfully pitched the idea for the OneNote Binder

So I uncringed. What made all the difference was the push-button ease of having the structure in place of the OneNote Binder. On its own, OneNote can often be frightening (I refer to is as the fear of the blank page). When you add in the structure of the OneNote Binder, an environment teachers and students are already comfortable with, they can easily start the process of digitizing their curriculum, expanding the collaboration amongst students and classes, and broadening the space we define as the classroom.

Since Office365, OneNote and the OneNote Notebook are all free for K12 schools, you should likely give it a try!
-----

*I paraphrase except for the quote in red. That was way too memorable to get wrong! And I had to write a blog post just to get it out of my head.

Comments

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...

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...

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

Search This Blog