The #OneNote Grand Tour

The #OneNote Grand Tour - Part 0

In the summer of 2012, I started a new position at Appleby College. Moving from math teacher to "indeterminate job title"¹ meant that for the first time in 20 years, I would not be in the classroom. The goal of the school was to make technology use meaningful at the School by working directly with the folks in IT, while retaining the link to the teaching faculty. And the first result of that project was our OneNote Binder which engendered what would become Microsoft's OneNote ClassNotebook.

I'll never forget sketching out on the whiteboard the structure that Jason Llorin, our programmer, would bring to life in my OneNote.

Fast forward to the spring of 2016. Our School, through the generosity of our parent community, has a travel grant that teachers can apply to for support in doing their own independent research. And so I submitted one to look at how our initial work with OneNote has travelled around the world. We want to see how others use it in different countries, different schools, different contexts. How did we get things right? How did others adapt the Notebook? And where are we headed with the technology? What can we learn and what can we share?

Thanks to the assistance of the folks at GlowScot in Edinburgh and the indefatigable Marjolein Hoekstra (@OneNoteC) in the Hague, I'll be visiting a large number of schools and talking with as many teachers and other users of OneNote as possible. I cannot wait!

(And I will be riding a motorcycle around the south of England on the weekend. Hey, the schools aren't open on the weekend!)

So stay posted! I start on Monday the 13th and return on the 25th.

^__________
¹This really is true. Our CIO has never been able to settle on what I should be called, so he just makes up a name that describes the situation at that point in time. And I'm okay with that -- just as our learning space is under continual evolution, so do the expectations and demands of my position evolve. Names define things and by not putting a pin in it, we can remain responsive.

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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