Continuous formation

A picture à propos of nothing, except perhaps the recognition of the dying days of a teacher's summer vacation One of the major aspects of my job (and admittedly, one of my favourites) is finding ways to smooth out wrinkles in our systems.  To find efficiencies.  To save time.  It's mathematical, really ... if I can save 2 minutes off a teacher's day, in a staff of 100 that's 3 hours of time that can be better spent. We've made a lot of progress during the 2012-2013 but, to use a phrase I hate, we hit a lot of the low-hanging fruit.  The easy things.  We centralized and synchronized the OneNote Binders (okay, that was huge), the Faculty Calendar and the Duty Calendars so that they were done once and everyone could access and modify as necessary. We simplified the way teachers access and use information produced from the school's student information system, removing a tonne of roadblocks. We moved PD online and made it instantaneous.  There have been ...

Last year's introduction of shared OneNote Binders to our school really provided more fluid communication between teacher and student -- because there was anytime, anywhere, "any media" access to all of the student and teacher notes there is now a continual flow of contents and comments back and forth.  It's really starting to reshape assessment for & as learning . We had wanted the parents in the mix from the beginning but in order for the parents to see the inking done by the student and teacher, they had to have the OneNote program installed on their system.  Now, many of them likely do (and don't know it) but there is a minority running Macs and other parents want to be able to check on things from their offices where they may not have OneNote.  The 2010 OneNote web app didn't allow for seeing ink so was essentially useless.  Since one of the major leaps forward with tablet pcs is that students and teachers are not limited in the means by which t...

We had a really successful year last year when we rolled out the OneNote Binders ... and now we've responded to some of the feedback as we prepare to provide this year's version. Students have become accustomed to using the Assignments Section to submit their work; it's the Section that forms their assignment dropbox for the course.  In order to minimize the horizontal space used by the tab's names, we've renamed Assignments  as _A with the underscore character to keep it alphabetically at the far left. We've done the same thing with the former Assessed Section -- it's been renamed _R .  The Assessed (or now, _R eturned) section is the read-only space for students and parents to see their marked work -- they can see all the Pages of content that are placed in this section by the teacher but can't edit it.  They can, of course, copy it back out to their sections and make changes and resubmit it to the Assignments section. And the big change...

I have the incredible good fortune to watch a French teacher work over the next month.  She's taken on the responsibility for a Grade 10 French summer course for students.  The challenge is that she is teaching it online to students here in Canada and overseas, specifically China and Pakistan.  They are all existing students in our school that are trying to get ahead in our French program -- that's important because they are already familiar with the technology commonly used in our school.  While many school leverage the learning management system, the OneNote Binder has given her a way to not only structure her content but closely observe and provide feedback on every student's work from minute to minute. She is using Lync as her communication medium; this has been our one technological learning curve but both she and the students have been learning fast.  Lync is one of Microsoft's products so it is closely integrated into our email, Sharepoint and networ...

As we continue to prepare for the coming academic year (we don't start classes until the week after Labour Day) I've begun to prepare the data for the Faculty. One of the introductions last year was the "Duty Calendar" -- who does residential duty each night, both faculty and prefects (student leaders).  In the past, it was stored in five different spreadsheets, one for each house and then one for the entire campus (since on weekends, faculty members are assigned to the campus rather than specific houses during the day Saturday & Sunday).  No one from other houses knew who was doing duty in any other house and if swaps were made, folks were never really sure that the change had been made.  Now, although the data starts out on a spreadsheet (I configure a spreadsheet for the House Directors) it is then copy-and-pasted into a Sharepoint Calendar.  3 clicks and 2 key-presses for each spreadsheet and the information is available to all. To be precise, it is paste...

I mentioned it in yesterday's blog post and realized I hadn't discussed it before. I had done a presentation on line with Lync and although Lync does do recordings, the presentation was pretty dynamic with questions coming from the participants.  In order to make the presentation efficient for folks who couldn't attend, I used Present.Me to not only show the slides but also show me as I discussed the content. Well, it turned out that Present.Me was a big hit amongst the faculty (not like that wasn't my ulterior motive, eh?)  The Physical Education department used it in the Middle School for the student presentations on health topics almost immediately. I've found this introduction-by-stealth to be the best way of providing faculty with new ways of looking at information.  Giving them a link or even doing a video on a new application really does work... not surprisingly (thank you Dewey) actually showing them how it works in a context pushes their thinking and doi...

Our Guidance Department hold a series of information nights throughout the year and the most recent one was on our School's curriculum.  We do follow the provincial (i.e. government) curriculum so that our students leave with the expected high school diploma.  However, we have our own diploma with its own requirements -- we ask for more service learning (25 hours a year), more languages, more math, etc.   Not every parent can attend these information evenings and so the Guidance Department asked me to put the information up on line.  They wanted more than just the Powerpoint because that only provides a structure upon which they build their presentation.  Normally, I'd encourage them to use Present.me but they didn't want to have a particular "face" associated with the content -- they really only wanted a voice over for the Powerpoint.  They wanted a screencast.   With that decision made, we talked a good deal about the screencast itself.  T...