Continuous formation

This was a recent question posted amongst school educators G suite versus Office 365. Thoughts? Since I wrote a fair bit, I thought I'd also post it here: If people are learning with a modern pen-based tablet pc, or are learning math, science, or languages outside of the QWERTY keyboard, then it is Office365 specifically because of Microsoft OneNote. There is nothing in the Google Suite that provides a 360 degree flexible, open digital learning environment. However, that flexibility & openness does require a bit more work on training for novices (and some handholding for those teachers who aim pedagogically for a, umm, less-than-21st century and/or paperless classroom) . I cannot teach without it, and its use has improved instruction and assessment school wide. I have experienced that Google Classroom is really good at structured (and perhaps inflexible) document management, given its genesis on top of Google Drive. Teachers also seem dependent on a collection of 3rd party...

So I mentioned that one of the apps inside of Office365, Delve , is my best friend in a previous post  - mostly because it's an intelligent agent that helps me prioritize (and find) things I should be working on.  If you haven't clicked on the Waffle in Office365 and then clicked on the Delve button, you should stop reading and try it now! Beside the intelligence behind what you see, Delve has another layer to help you and your students keep things together: the Board.  The Board helps you deal with a "Shared with Me" that has gone out of control (well, to be fair, it goes out of control because you're using the Cloud effectively, so that's a good thing). When you see documents in Delve that "go together" you can pin them to a Board, allowing you to create a page of documents all on a particular project. What you see below you is what I see this morning when I click on "Me" (Cal Armstrong) ... it shows the two documents we used schoo...

There's no question that I think the best part of Office365, the best part of Microsoft, heck, the best part of the entire technology community is OneNote.  Hands down.  But what's #2? #2 is Delve.  Delve is the user face for every bit of intelligence that is developed from  "Office Graph", Microsoft's background data analyzer on the Office365 system.   People will never see the Office Graph ... okay, programmers may... but they'll see the results of what essentially is a blend of Watson (from Jeopardy fame) and Rosie (from the Jetsons) when they turn to Delve. The immediate problem? With everything saved in OneDrive, Office Sites, OneNote, Yammer and Office365 Video students and teachers have a ridiculously long list of files and folders available to them.  And not only do they have their own files & folders, they have people sharing files, folders and OneNotes with them, too. This isn't just a Microsoft thing ... I also have a 120Gb GoogleDriv...

Teacher content displayed on projector So it was optimistic of me to say I'd be able to post twice in the same day... so here I continue from #My24Hrs Part 1. So as it turned out, I didn't have a lot of time to run around to classes.  I managed to pop into one geography class and saw what I would expect to see -- students working with each other, teacher roaming around the room after putting up a motivating question on the projector, and OneNote in high use. Using Split Screen (Window&CursorRight and then Window&CursorLeft) so that students can pull ideas across applications I did manage to stop by our Admissions Office for a meeting and recorded our admissions coordinator over how she uses OneNote with students (students volunteer as Tour Guides so all their material and scheduling is done in a shared OneNote with them).  I thought the most telling comment, from someone deeply engaged in the administration of information is that, while she might have li...

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...