Continuous formation

So the October 2018 Windows 10 Update has provided a new snipping tool ... now, it surprises me that this would be the thing I'm most happy about, but it is! Making things we do very often each day as easy as possible has immediate payoffs in the classroom , so this is a huge leap forward. If your IT Department hasn't yet given you the Update, you can update yourself by downloading it from here . Here's what makes the new Snip & Sketch so slick.... Press WINDOWS-SHIFT-S The screen goes grey and along the top you have the option to rectangular, freefom or full-screen clip.  I typically use rectangular to grab student content from OneNote or the web. Once you've finished the selection, up pops a success note in the Notification area of your screen. Click on that notification and up pops the Snip&Sketch App (which you can pin to your Taskbar or Start if you want). In the app, you can use #digitalink to draw and highlight content -- although I hope t...

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...