Continuous formation

Microsoft recently began rolling out an update to their Post-It Note software, which they call StickyNotes - now at version 3.  You can get it in the Microsoft Store here .  For the sake of clarity, I'll continue to refer to them as Post-It Notes -- they're like Kleenex. What's nice now is that the Notes now sync between devices that are tied to the same Microsoft/Office365 account.  So my school laptop, my home desktop and my phone can now access all the same notes all the time. (I did use my personal Microsoft Account rather than my O365 account because I use them for personal reminders and not just academic ones.) The application is as simple and colourful as you'd expect.  You click the + sign to get a new note. You'll briefly see a little check mark as the note gets synced to the cloud.  There are some basic formatting ( bold , italic , underline , list ... and strike-out for when you get things done!).  And you can change the colour of the not...

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...

Sigh. It's tough to disagree with Fawn Nguyen. (http://fawnnguyen.com/maybe-less-tech-in-math-and-school/) She wrote, in particular: I want them talking and interacting more than anything! Learning mathematics is a social endeavor. Here’s my perennial classroom routine, “Turn and talk with your neighbor.” I want to bring back the arts of speaking and listening, reading and writing, debating and presenting. Now, if you've ever dropped by my class (and, thanks to #ObserveMe you're always welcome to! I just realized, I never wrote about #ObserveMe ... something to correct over this March Break) you'lll notice a lot of devices. My classroom has 1:1 pen-based Win10 TabletPCs -- everyhone thinks of "Surfaces" but they're actually made by Fujitsu. My classroom has OneNote, which captures as much as everything that gets written and a part of what gets said/displayed/acted out using audio/video capture. This means we have access to digital ink - so e...

A few years ago there was a great Twitter hashtag #NeedARedStamp about errors that students continually make and how it would be easier to just stamp your usual response on their papers.  Check 'em out here! I need a red stamp.  But not for kids' math papers. Everybody and their cousin has tweeted the latest  (in this case NYTimes) opinion piece " Laptops are great. But not during a lecture or meeting " at me.  And quite frankly, I'm too busy doing real work to spend a lot of time on a response.  So I include below a response I wrote earlier this summer as part of a discussion on another professor that said the same thing. I think I buried the lede, so I've bolded it in this posting. And I haven't even dug into the #digitalink possibilities that these professors ignore in their ham-fisted "device bad" response. -------- [personal references omitted] You’re likely speaking to the wrong group – I doubt that most of our pedagogies rely ...

As folks know, I'm a big fan of #digitalink -- as a math teacher, as an aspiring creative person, I always want to scribble. I write on everything at home, and always have.  The back of envelopes (when people use to send them), post-it notes, boxes... I scribble everywhere.  I also doodle a lot when I'm bored. Lots of geometric figures, fractals and attempts at people. But it's also math -- math is drawing, sketching, inking the patterns & graphs we ask them to provide the algebra for.  And algebra! Lord, the notations. That's why, when we were rebuilding our classrooms and someone asked me my opinion, I asked specifically for desks that would allow whiteboard markers.  And it's been great!  My students aren't encumbered by the limits of paper or the laptop's screen and they don't have to go up to the board to collaborate.  They use the desk-top and a whiteboard marker.  In this digital age, they then use the Office Lens app on their phones to...

So my good friend and colleague Anjuli Ahooja and I were fortunate enough to host a student panel on learning technologies at the STAO (Science Teachers Association of Ontario) and teachers in the audience asked the following questions.  I tried to keep to actual student quotes. "I use Google Classroom... What is the advantage of using OneNote ClassNotebook?" "I've used both ... this [OneNote] is more seamless" "Google is so dependent a lot on internet connection, because they're internet based software and systems they have limited functionality in terms of the things you can be creative with... we're able to do more things" [OneNote works without need for continuous wifi]" "Because you have so many resources at your fingertips, you're able to use them all in one common space... I feel a lot more engaged and I'm a lot more easily able to integrate aspects into one common note instead of having multiple [files]" ...

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...

Microsoft asked if we could put together 5-point tip lists.  As it happens, I had started to scribble down some thoughts on a recent snow day (a Rumspringa for teachers) and never got it completed so while I'm on March Break I have the time to finish it up. This is just basic, free OneNote -- without any special add-ons like Onetastic  or the OneNote Class or Staff Notebooks . Screenshot of shared Notebook for the 3-week PCMI PD workshop. Since we didn't use paper, everything was continuously updated  and accessible by the participants 1. OneNote is sharing Even before the amazing classroom space of the OneNote Class Notebook was created, OneNote was always about sharing.  You create a notebook and share it (via an emailed or web-based link) with anyone you want to either view or edit.  They don't need to have OneNote installed and, depending on how you share it, they don't even need to sign in. You're only three clicks from sharing your Notebo...