Continuous formation

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...

Since organization is important when visiting an incredibly packed conference like the annual National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), I thought I would share my approach to that using OneNote.  You can visit it here: http://tinyurl.com/nctm18onenote How did I do it?  First, I visited http://www.onenote.com and signed in with my Microsoft Account.  If you don't have a Microsoft Account (1) they're free and (2) you can make any email into a Microsoft Account login, so you're not creating a new email.  It's just another identity provider, like Google, Facebook or Twitter. There's a (very small) button to add a new OneNote Notebook on the OneNote website -- this is also where you can get at all of your notebooks, both those you created and those that have been shared with you.I named the OneNote "NCTM 2018" .. it comes created with a Section called "Quick Notes" and a first page. Now, every one of my browsers have the OneNote Web...

So, long story short, we have a bit of extra time in our Right-Angle Trigonometry unit, so I mentioned to my team that I would put together a BreakOut for review.  During this time, we have a lot of kids away for various reasons so having something self-paced is helpful. You can read more about creating BreakOut/EscapeRooms in OneNote on my earlier post here: Escape Room / BreakOut in OneNote - even if you don't use OneNote in your school, you could do this with a Personal OneNote.  All you have to do is create a view-only Share with your class and they can view it online!  Even on their phones! I first made a OneNote Notebook and shared it with the other members of my team. I had hoped that they would contribute but only one jumped on board and added some questions -- not upset though. There's a lot of things that happen at my school, so I just lay out breadcrumbs and see who's hungry enough to follow. In this Notebook, I created 5 Sections - each section is a "R...

[[Part 2 of this article is here: Link] ] So when I was visiting  Anna in Edinburgh  during March Break, she showed me how she used Password-Protected OneNote sections within the OneNote ClassNotebook to help students check their work -- she set the password to the correct answer, so they knew they had it right when the Section opened up. I figured I could use this for Math Review, so I set aside a couple of hours (turned out to be 3 hours but a fair chunk of that was solution-time) the other night to put an Exam Review together for my Grade 10 Mathematics course.  I pulled together as many multiple choice questions and short answer questions on the topics as I could Google and tried to balance each Section with a mix of topics and then threw in a couple of pop-culture questions, too.  The students worked on the problems in each section and used the answers as passwords to unlock the next section until they got to the Prize section. Result?  Near to...