Continuous formation

So as soon as I posted the previous blog on changing permissions , I was asked how I would create a Digital Portfolio section inside the student's section; that is, a section that the teacher can add content to but the student can't change.  (Yes, it's not the full spirit of a DP but it has aspects of the footprints of a DP.)  It's a bit of a challenge to get at the files (and there's likely a quicker way) but here's how I get at it... Go to your site. As I mentioned in the previous blog, when you first look at OneNote notebooks in Sharepoint/Office365, they appear to be one single file.  They're not, though ... what we're seeing is analogous to a zip file and we need to see the individual files inside.  Each section in the Notebook is an actual file so we can base our permissions on each tab. So... how to get to the files?  There likely is an easier way... but here goes. Head on over to your site and click on the Gear for Site Contents. You

I realized the other day while writing Parts 1 ( link ) & 2 ( link ) that I'd never talked about the Private Teacher Section Group in our OneNote Binders... During our first year with the OneNote Binders (our initial design that ended up becoming the OneNote Class Notebook) we quickly realized we needed a private space in the _Teacher section of the Notebook... teachers were having to create additional Notebooks to do their planning and then copying the material into the class Notebook for students to get access to. So during our first year we trialled with a few teachers creating a _P section group within the _Teacher section group (the "Content Library" of the #OneNoteClass) that students had no rights to -- and it worked perfectly!  Teachers could not only prep lessons & units ahead of time and keep them within the appropriate Notebook but they could also use them for assessment notes, markbooks, exemplars, etc.  The next year, the teachers moved the entire

So the amazing Marilyn Steier, an educator from Alberta I met while in Barcelona for the Microsoft Global Forum last year, asked a question on Microsoft's Canada Education Yammer group ( Link ) about removing students and teachers from the OneNote Class Notebook.  And it got me thinking ... we've been using the OneNote Binders at Appleby College school wide for the past three years -- it's a pretty sophisticated tool.  We happily showed Microsoft our framework and they created the OneNote Class Notebook Creator ... it lets anyone use something similar to our OneNote Binder for free!  If you're not already using it... go to www.onenoteforteachers.com and get it. But our OneNote Binder has a lot of features that the Microsoft Class Notebook doesn't yet have.  We have a group collaboration section where teams of any size can work in private (so Janey and Johnny can work in their section while Tommy and Tammy work in theirs, unlike the Collaboration Library where e

So we had a snow day Monday.  I won't go in to the gloriousness that a snow day is here in Canada.  Suffice it to say that they're as close to heaven as you can get without dying. It came at a cost; there was 35cm of snow across my neighbourhood.  My neighbours are not teachers, they tend to be young families or retired folks -- so when I get a snow day, I grab my shovel and start clearing the snow from their driveways and steps.  I know how privileged I am to get the day free and not have to drive, slowly and dangerously, to work on snow-covered roads. As I was shoveling through five different driveways, I was using my phone to play music.  I kept getting this buzz of messages coming in, though... which is unusual on a snow day.  It turned out that students, safely tucked away at home, were using Yammer (our conversation space) to ask and answer math questions unbidden by their teachers! Now, we had great success at Christmas prior to exams as students used Yammer to post t