Continuous formation

One of the handy things about having infinite storage in Office365 is that there are versions of every bit of your work stored continually.  So, when I worked on the Word document in my previous blog post on Restricting Editing (here) the Word Document had several Previous Versions, snapshots of my work in progress, stored in my OneDrive alongside the most current version.  And I can bring them back, or compare them with the current version pretty easily. Open up your document in the Word applications as usual, then click on FILE and choose INFO. You'll see a button called VERSION HISTORY... go ahead and click on that! You will flip back into the Word Application and see the list of the different timed versions along the left.  You can click the Open Version that is below each version and that version will open in a new application window so you can then edit, save under a new name, grab content you had deleted by mistake, etc. Now, what if your current version ...

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...

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...

One of the activities in Reflecting on Practice today involved developing question stems that would promote math talk.  We wanted a quick and easy way of collecting the sample question stems each participant had created -- a survey lets us distribute the typing and simplifies the redistribution for tomorrow's task. In the past we would have used GoogleDocs because it puts the responses into a spreadsheet for easy analysis and distribution.  But, since we've been using Microsoft OneNote extensively, the majority of the participants have managed to get a Microsoft account and have started to use the OneDrive Web Apps for Word, Excel & PowerPoint.  Alongside the web-versions of the desktop apps, OneDrive offers the Excel Survey tool and already participants have been playing with the opportunities. It's relatively easy to get started.  Click on the CREATE button in your OneDrive and you'll get the opportunity to create an online survey, with the entries going di...