Continuous formation

I recently described myself as a devout pragmatist - and that has been reflected in the way I've taken on my role as technology liaison in our IT department.  I'm not an evangelizer; I'm a productivity and efficiency consultant.  If I can find 5 minutes of savings for a teacher in their class, that's time they can put to better use helping students learn; it's time they can assess better; it's time they can interact with parents.  Sure, I want them to be collaborative, encourage curiosity, differentiate for student needs, but they need time and a structure to do that in. We hit our first major time saving four years ago when we designed the first OneNote Class Notebook with structured sections for teachers and students, with the added benefit of a workflow for assessment & digital portfolios -- and we've pushed for continual time savings every year through OneDrive and Office365. So when Microsoft started the #My24Hrs hashtag to celebrate how techn...

It often surprises me when folks don't know about Office365 and/or don't know how Microsoft has changed its educational offerings in the past few years.  Although Google definitely had the lead up to say 2011, Microsoft has quickly come up from behind and re-invented the educational space for teaching, learning, collaboration and creativity. So, briefly, my top five reasons * why any school would benefit from running Office365. 1) OneNote and the OneNote Class Notebook There is nothing comparable to OneNote and the OneNote Class Notebook  / Staff Notebook anywhere on the market.  It's paper... made digital!  It allows an easy transition from folks used to working with paper but also is a springboard to digitize everything in a classroom, office or home.  It makes it easy to take a quick note (on any device) or write a thesis.  It's a container for everything (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, sound and video files) but then allows you to organize...

So, Alice Keeler -  @alicekeeler - who is an  amazing blogger  and an incredible resource for those using Google products, posted  60 Ways Math Teachers can use Google Classroom  last April.  It came across my desk the other day and, since school hadn't started yet, I thought it might be a good reflection for me on how one could do similar tasks with OneNote Class Notebook. I went through the list and checked that I could accomplish them all with OneNote and re-wrote her post with those modifications ... but it was looking a little "plagiarism-y" so, just to check, I emailed Alice to see if she was okay with it.  She was not, but encouraged me to do my own brainstorming. So... Math Teachers & OneNote (including OneNote Class Notebook).  My top five...  1) The Under-valued value of scribbles & notation If you really want to be "paperless" (and that should never be a goal - you want to be digital so that content is ...

While at the Bringing-IT-Together conference  (one of the best gathering of learners in North America) in November 2015 I had the opportunity to present at a few sessions , mostly on OneNote (of course?) but I also got to work with some folks from Microsoft and, in recognition of being a Microsoft Education Fellow and Innovative Expert Educator and my school being a Microsoft World Tour School, they gave me an amazingly red t-shirt with the image below on the back. I'm not one for "labels" (Distinguished Educator, Certified Innovator... all those pretentious, self-aggrandizing badges from various companies... what was the SmartBoard one?) .  I'm not a fan of wearing corporate labelling, either, and am regularly removing tags, flags and the like from my clothing.  And except for PCMI, I'm not one for t-shirts at all (I used to have to wear a collared shirt to sit at the dinner table), but I was very humbled that our Microsoft Canada Education rep Lia De Cicco-Re...

So it's pretty common that folks use Google Forms to create an automatically graded assessment.  Now, I have to admit, as a mathematics teacher I don't do a lot of fixed-response assessments like this that need automatic grading.  But that doesn't mean it isn't a useful option. In fact this post arises not from automatic grading but rather a situation in our Psychology course.  The teachers were doing a study with their students and wanted to collect the data easily and run a T- Test with as little work as possible.  (A  t-test, roughly speaking, determines whether two groups are different from each other.) We set up an Excel Survey for the students to enter their results and then in a second sheet in the spreadsheet containing the Survey, we laid out the T-Test.  As the results came in, the T-Test continually re-evaluated.  Success! I figured if it can work for a T-Test, it can work for a simple multiple-choice, True/False or simple word respons...

This follows on the hacking work done with OneNote Class Notebook - including adding a digital portfolio and a private planning area for teachers in the Content section . My amazing colleague Anjuli Ahooja is an active participant with  Science On Stage.  As a result of a workshop in Europe last year, she began a collaboration with a school in France. Two of her classes have been combined with a class of the French teacher.  In order to have collaboration easily between the two different physical and temporal spaces, we use the OneNote Class Notebook.   Each of Anjuli's students here in Canada was teamed up with a French student -- this couple will work together on a project. We ran the OneNote Class Notebook app to create the initial OneNote Notebook, setting Anjuli and the French teacher as co-teachers (so that they can see all the content in every student's section as well as modify the Content Library teacher section) and enrolled each of our (English)...

(So I ran into Minnia Feng, the Community Organizer for the Microsoft Expert Educators when I was in Redmond last month and she mentioned I'd taken her "5 item listicles" by the horns.  Long story short, I believe than when I'm faced with a constraint, I become more creative and prolific viz. Twitter.  So I'll continue with the idea of keeping it, or pushing it to five) Everyone was in a hullabaloo about the Apple Watch recently but I have to admit I'm not a great fan of the Apple ecosystem. ITunes drives me to distraction moving anything in or out and the inability to hack into the AppleTV is an ongoing irritation in my house.  So the Apple Watch didn't catch my interest. A friend from Seattle (Michael Smith, IT Director at Forest Ridge School ) had showed me the Microsoft Band in November and I was curious but I only wear a watch when I'm on police duty anymore. But then... Ben Schorr (@bschorr on Twitter) mentioned that he could push notes fr...