Continuous formation

So on Fridays, I sit in the Lounge at School so that folks can get assistance with things. It's good because just seeing me will prompt them "Oh, I had a question for you!"  Today, someone sat down with a coffee and asked me "So, if you have a question, who do you ask?" The question serendipitously coincided with my Feedly highlighting a new post from Richard Byrne, an avid tech blogger (who I recommend following). He gave a good run-down of Twitter accounts to follow to keep up with tips & changes with Google .  Since I'm committed to blogging every day this month, I thought I would respond with whom I follow on Twitter from Microsoft. @Microsoft  - the primary Microsoft Account.  I don't actually follow it; I rely on the rest of my Twitter folk to provide an important filtering action to let me know what's important. @MSFTEnable  - one of the most impressive things I learned at  Ignite2016  (the all-Microsoft conference held an...

We're just prepping for the start of the school year (we don't start teaching until the 12th) and I just thought I'd run through how enmeshed Microsoft OneNote is to our school. 1) Class OneNotes -- this is where it all started five years ago, so we have over 2500 Class Notebooks in our archive.  Each year, we run a script against our timetable and a Class Notebook is created for every class, with a Teacher Content Library section group (including a private planning space), a Group Collaboration Space section group (with a wide-open collaborative space along with the opportunity to add additional small-group spaces at the teacher's whim), and a section group for each student (with appropriate student assignment dropbox, private teacher marking space and a returned section which the student can't edit for marked work.  This is all spelt out here here and here . But then there are all the other places we use OneNote that I thought we should mention. 2) Depa...

There are two pillars in the education sector right now, Google and Microsoft.  Google has Google Appsfor Education which is made up of Google Drive (a file system), Google Docs, and a variety of other applications that work relatively well together.  Microsoft, on the other hand, has OneNote Class Notebook along with the rest of the Office suite, OneDrive (a file system) that also work relatively well together. There is, however, an important distinction between the two.  Google Apps, with Google Drive & Docs at its core, is the last, desperate breath of the GutenbergParenthesis… the final phase of the (relatively) brief time in human history where knowledge, information, imagination, thought and creativity were held subservient to the linear progress of  typeprint .   Google Apps, tied to the discrete structure of the Drive and the typewriter-environment of Docs, keeps the students locked into the workspace of the earliest type-setters, albeit i...

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 ...

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...