Continuous formation

So I mentioned that one of the apps inside of Office365, Delve , is my best friend in a previous post  - mostly because it's an intelligent agent that helps me prioritize (and find) things I should be working on.  If you haven't clicked on the Waffle in Office365 and then clicked on the Delve button, you should stop reading and try it now! Beside the intelligence behind what you see, Delve has another layer to help you and your students keep things together: the Board.  The Board helps you deal with a "Shared with Me" that has gone out of control (well, to be fair, it goes out of control because you're using the Cloud effectively, so that's a good thing). When you see documents in Delve that "go together" you can pin them to a Board, allowing you to create a page of documents all on a particular project. What you see below you is what I see this morning when I click on "Me" (Cal Armstrong) ... it shows the two documents we used schoo...

I wrote this on Facebook for my family and friends... In the summer of 2012, I drew a diagram of a nested set of folders on a whiteboard and turned to Jason Llorin, our OneNote programmer, and asked "can you make me that?" And he could, and he did. In 2013, I presented a paper & a poster to a conference on the results of that experiment at our school and ended up after my presentation being asked to have lunch with a guy from Microsoft Research. I a m immensely proud that my School said to Microsoft after that initial meeting in 2013 "here, take what we have and bring it to the world". And they did. Through a lot of hard work of a lot of people at Appleby College, students, staff and faculty, we made a start to a technology that today Microsoft announced has been used by 400,000 teachers and 3.5 million students.   The OneNote Class Notebook. We have laid the groundwork for a whole new approach to education, digitizing content and providing workflows tha...

There's no question that I think the best part of Office365, the best part of Microsoft, heck, the best part of the entire technology community is OneNote.  Hands down.  But what's #2? #2 is Delve.  Delve is the user face for every bit of intelligence that is developed from  "Office Graph", Microsoft's background data analyzer on the Office365 system.   People will never see the Office Graph ... okay, programmers may... but they'll see the results of what essentially is a blend of Watson (from Jeopardy fame) and Rosie (from the Jetsons) when they turn to Delve. The immediate problem? With everything saved in OneDrive, Office Sites, OneNote, Yammer and Office365 Video students and teachers have a ridiculously long list of files and folders available to them.  And not only do they have their own files & folders, they have people sharing files, folders and OneNotes with them, too. This isn't just a Microsoft thing ... I also have a 120Gb GoogleDriv...

Teacher content displayed on projector So it was optimistic of me to say I'd be able to post twice in the same day... so here I continue from #My24Hrs Part 1. So as it turned out, I didn't have a lot of time to run around to classes.  I managed to pop into one geography class and saw what I would expect to see -- students working with each other, teacher roaming around the room after putting up a motivating question on the projector, and OneNote in high use. Using Split Screen (Window&CursorRight and then Window&CursorLeft) so that students can pull ideas across applications I did manage to stop by our Admissions Office for a meeting and recorded our admissions coordinator over how she uses OneNote with students (students volunteer as Tour Guides so all their material and scheduling is done in a shared OneNote with them).  I thought the most telling comment, from someone deeply engaged in the administration of information is that, while she might have li...