Continuous formation

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...

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...

(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...

Continuing on the Microsoft Expert Educator suggestion to make 5-tips-articles here's one on Yammer. Yammer is part of Office365 and is free to schools, faculty and students as part of their free Office365 subscriptions.  On first glance, and in general discussion with faculty and students, its best approximation is a social networking conversation space like Facebook. So why not just use Facebook?  For Facebook there is the explicit danger of using a personal space for professional work between & amongst students and teachers, Instead, Yammer is built in to the Office365 structure (so security and consistency of passwords).  And, for the data hungry, Yammer allows you to do analysis on the posts (everything can be downloaded into Excel) -- we're looking forward to a longitudinal analysis of student writing as we move year-to-year.. 5 ideas on how to maximize Yammer's effectiveness: 1) Use Yammer school wide for announcement and discussions. Email is notor...

So a colleague posted this on a Yammer conversation the other day and I didn't want to try to post to it without some explanations, for which Yammer did not provide sufficient space.  And since Microsoft encouraged us to post "5 point articles" I feel constrained to continue in that fashion :) I'm not sure I ever would have suggested digital inking to create art in OneNote... there are FAR better tools for that!  Brief sketches, initial designs perhaps but a full art curriculum deserves far more than OneNote can offer (and that's OneNote's biggest advocate talking!) Amongst OneNote's strengths (see a 5-point rundown here) are its sharing abilities and ease with multimedia. My ideas, then, are based on that understanding ... how easy it is take take anything and share it -- and then build on it. I am not sure it necessarily enhances Art but it does bring Art and the learning of Art into a richer environment. These also require no more than...

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...

We've had almost four years with our OneNote ClassBinder , having rolled it out to every class from 7 to 12, math to languages to phys-ed every year.  In the first year we had 85% of classes voluntarily use it -- that's the power of handing teachers the open structure of OneNote!  (People always ask about training... here's my notes on that topic.) The easy part is already done by OneNote and the OneNote ClassNotebook Creator (get them both free here http://www.onenoteforteachers.com/ !) OneNote gives you a wide open canvas for any type of content and the ease of automatically syncing across any device.  The ClassNotebook Creator creates the structure that teachers & students need to use OneNote effectively, without having to think about it . So, here's the Five Next Steps once you have the OneNote ClassNotebook Creator run: 1) Put the important stuff " Above the Fold "   Take over the introductory page and make it your Announcements/Course Plan...