Continuous formation

I don't usually talk about aspects of Office365 that require one of the paid subscriptions because, well, they cost money and I know teachers and schools have to prioritize their budgets (or have it prioritized for them). Remember that Office365 level A1 is free for schools, teachers & students and the tools you do get are very powerful -- you can check it out here .  But if you are a paid Office365 user, you have access to another handy little tool included in your subscription (and since you're paying for it, you might as well use it!) Bookings is a (relatively simple) appointment booking web service. It works like this: Visit http://portal.office.com and click on "All your Apps".  It is hidden away under the main Office Apps -- and your admin could have it turned off, although it is turned on by default, so shhhh...  It's available in the paid A3/A5 levels, just not the free A1 :(   Now, it's okay that it's not immediately visible because your ...

So, as I'm getting ready for our training for new Faculty I thought I'd put together the steps for making a survey or collecting data. You can see some of my other posts on Microsoft Forms by clicking the link . 1. VISIT http://forms.microsoft.com and sign in with your Office365 ID/password.  Or click on the FORMS button in the Waffle.  Or click the FORMS button if you're in OneNote. Remember that you or your School can sign up for Office365 for free. Button in OneNote Button on the Office365 Waffle 2. To keep this short, I'll only be covering Forms part of Microsoft Forms, where you just collect data without "grading" or "providing feedback".  There's a whole Quiz part of Forms that I'll cover later.  Too much all at once.  So, CLICK on "New Form" or, if you already have a Form, click on its card. (You may also have Forms that have been Shared With You or Forms that you have access to as part of an existing Group, s...

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...

A brief aside. I had dropped by a workshop first thing this morning and was sitting at the front and wanted to grab a shot of the screen; at first I used my camera -- I wasn't thinking.  As soon as I looked at the image, I realized I should be using Office Lens.  Look, it was early morning and I wasn't quite awake. Just using the camera app Office Lens is an app for both Android ( link ) and iPhone/iPad ( link ) - and its main purpose is to capture physical content, clean it up and add it into your OneNote. When you start the app, you get a camera ... but with a bouncing, resizing white rectangle superimposed on your image.  It's a smart rectangle, so it's looking for the piece of paper, the whiteboard, the business card, the content that is sitting in front of you.  Once you have it framed by the white rectangle, you tap the photo button and it grabs the image, cleans it up (brightens, sharpens), crops and... if the image...

So I mentioned that one of the apps inside of Office365, Delve , is my best friend in a previous post  - mostly because it's an intelligent agent that helps me prioritize (and find) things I should be working on.  If you haven't clicked on the Waffle in Office365 and then clicked on the Delve button, you should stop reading and try it now! Beside the intelligence behind what you see, Delve has another layer to help you and your students keep things together: the Board.  The Board helps you deal with a "Shared with Me" that has gone out of control (well, to be fair, it goes out of control because you're using the Cloud effectively, so that's a good thing). When you see documents in Delve that "go together" you can pin them to a Board, allowing you to create a page of documents all on a particular project. What you see below you is what I see this morning when I click on "Me" (Cal Armstrong) ... it shows the two documents we used schoo...

There's no question that I think the best part of Office365, the best part of Microsoft, heck, the best part of the entire technology community is OneNote.  Hands down.  But what's #2? #2 is Delve.  Delve is the user face for every bit of intelligence that is developed from  "Office Graph", Microsoft's background data analyzer on the Office365 system.   People will never see the Office Graph ... okay, programmers may... but they'll see the results of what essentially is a blend of Watson (from Jeopardy fame) and Rosie (from the Jetsons) when they turn to Delve. The immediate problem? With everything saved in OneDrive, Office Sites, OneNote, Yammer and Office365 Video students and teachers have a ridiculously long list of files and folders available to them.  And not only do they have their own files & folders, they have people sharing files, folders and OneNotes with them, too. This isn't just a Microsoft thing ... I also have a 120Gb GoogleDriv...

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...

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...