Continuous formation

It often surprises me when folks don't know about Office365 and/or don't know how Microsoft has changed its educational offerings in the past few years.  Although Google definitely had the lead up to say 2011, Microsoft has quickly come up from behind and re-invented the educational space for teaching, learning, collaboration and creativity. So, briefly, my top five reasons * why any school would benefit from running Office365. 1) OneNote and the OneNote Class Notebook There is nothing comparable to OneNote and the OneNote Class Notebook  / Staff Notebook anywhere on the market.  It's paper... made digital!  It allows an easy transition from folks used to working with paper but also is a springboard to digitize everything in a classroom, office or home.  It makes it easy to take a quick note (on any device) or write a thesis.  It's a container for everything (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, sound and video files) but then allows you to organize...

So, Alice Keeler -  @alicekeeler - who is an  amazing blogger  and an incredible resource for those using Google products, posted  60 Ways Math Teachers can use Google Classroom  last April.  It came across my desk the other day and, since school hadn't started yet, I thought it might be a good reflection for me on how one could do similar tasks with OneNote Class Notebook. I went through the list and checked that I could accomplish them all with OneNote and re-wrote her post with those modifications ... but it was looking a little "plagiarism-y" so, just to check, I emailed Alice to see if she was okay with it.  She was not, but encouraged me to do my own brainstorming. So... Math Teachers & OneNote (including OneNote Class Notebook).  My top five...  1) The Under-valued value of scribbles & notation If you really want to be "paperless" (and that should never be a goal - you want to be digital so that content is ...

While at the Bringing-IT-Together conference  (one of the best gathering of learners in North America) in November 2015 I had the opportunity to present at a few sessions , mostly on OneNote (of course?) but I also got to work with some folks from Microsoft and, in recognition of being a Microsoft Education Fellow and Innovative Expert Educator and my school being a Microsoft World Tour School, they gave me an amazingly red t-shirt with the image below on the back. I'm not one for "labels" (Distinguished Educator, Certified Innovator... all those pretentious, self-aggrandizing badges from various companies... what was the SmartBoard one?) .  I'm not a fan of wearing corporate labelling, either, and am regularly removing tags, flags and the like from my clothing.  And except for PCMI, I'm not one for t-shirts at all (I used to have to wear a collared shirt to sit at the dinner table), but I was very humbled that our Microsoft Canada Education rep Lia De Cicco-Re...