400,000 and 3.5 million

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 am 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 that build on the past but provide for the present and future of technology, with a nod to a strong and vibrant pedagogy. Our faculty and students have continued to provide feedback on how to make things better and our approach is still the world leader in OneNote implementation.
At its heart, and the reason why I drew the diagram in the first place, was to bring to my classroom what I first read in Wiliam & Black so long ago: " Discussion, observation of activities, and marking of written work can all be used to provide those opportunities [of communicating their understanding], but it is then important to look at or listen carefully to the talk, the writing, and the actions through which pupils develop and display the state of their understanding " OneNote gave me a way of seeing and capturing through ink, text, audio & video my students' learning and then providing them feedback in multiple media without being impeded by physical space or time. I no longer lost them when they left the room with their notes -- and they no longer lost me when they changed classes.
And now, thanks to Appleby College, the whole world has the same opportunity.
— at Appleby College.

My research poster at WIPTTE2013 ... likely also the first use of Aurasma Augmented Reality on a research poster.

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 refr

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

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