Skip to main content

#My24Hrs Part 1

I recently described myself as a devout pragmatist - and that has been reflected in the way I've taken on my role as technology liaison in our IT department.  I'm not an evangelizer; I'm a productivity and efficiency consultant.  If I can find 5 minutes of savings for a teacher in their class, that's time they can put to better use helping students learn; it's time they can assess better; it's time they can interact with parents.  Sure, I want them to be collaborative, encourage curiosity, differentiate for student needs, but they need time and a structure to do that in.
We hit our first major time saving four years ago when we designed the first OneNote Class Notebook with structured sections for teachers and students, with the added benefit of a workflow for assessment & digital portfolios -- and we've pushed for continual time savings every year through OneDrive and Office365.

So when Microsoft started the #My24Hrs hashtag to celebrate how technology was allowing us to empower ourselves and others through technology, to me... that's all about how things have been made better.

Today, I'll be asking faculty, staff and students how technology has made their lives easier, more efficient and more effective.  And tonight, I'll wrap up my thoughts.

Comments

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...

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...