Continuous formation

I wrote this on Facebook for my family and friends... In the summer of 2012, I drew a diagram of a nested set of folders on a whiteboard and turned to Jason Llorin, our OneNote programmer, and asked "can you make me that?" And he could, and he did. In 2013, I presented a paper & a poster to a conference on the results of that experiment at our school and ended up after my presentation being asked to have lunch with a guy from Microsoft Research. I a m immensely proud that my School said to Microsoft after that initial meeting in 2013 "here, take what we have and bring it to the world". And they did. Through a lot of hard work of a lot of people at Appleby College, students, staff and faculty, we made a start to a technology that today Microsoft announced has been used by 400,000 teachers and 3.5 million students.   The OneNote Class Notebook. We have laid the groundwork for a whole new approach to education, digitizing content and providing workflows tha...

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 ...

I realized the other day while writing Parts 1 ( link ) & 2 ( link ) that I'd never talked about the Private Teacher Section Group in our OneNote Binders... During our first year with the OneNote Binders (our initial design that ended up becoming the OneNote Class Notebook) we quickly realized we needed a private space in the _Teacher section of the Notebook... teachers were having to create additional Notebooks to do their planning and then copying the material into the class Notebook for students to get access to. So during our first year we trialled with a few teachers creating a _P section group within the _Teacher section group (the "Content Library" of the #OneNoteClass) that students had no rights to -- and it worked perfectly!  Teachers could not only prep lessons & units ahead of time and keep them within the appropriate Notebook but they could also use them for assessment notes, markbooks, exemplars, etc.  The next year, the teachers moved the entire ...

So the amazing Marilyn Steier, an educator from Alberta I met while in Barcelona for the Microsoft Global Forum last year, asked a question on Microsoft's Canada Education Yammer group ( Link ) about removing students and teachers from the OneNote Class Notebook.  And it got me thinking ... we've been using the OneNote Binders at Appleby College school wide for the past three years -- it's a pretty sophisticated tool.  We happily showed Microsoft our framework and they created the OneNote Class Notebook Creator ... it lets anyone use something similar to our OneNote Binder for free!  If you're not already using it... go to www.onenoteforteachers.com and get it. But our OneNote Binder has a lot of features that the Microsoft Class Notebook doesn't yet have.  We have a group collaboration section where teams of any size can work in private (so Janey and Johnny can work in their section while Tommy and Tammy work in theirs, unlike the Collaboration Library where e...

When we first introduced the OneNote Binders , amongst the immediate requests was for group collaboration spaces.  For the first year, we had the teachers request them through our IT request system and manually created them and assigned the permissions.  But, given the convenience of OneNote, we knew we wanted a dynamic solution... and so we rolled out a webapp that would create groups of any size or shape! The teacher goes to the webapp and decides on a name for the Project and then assigns students to groups.  Some teachers will create only one group and then they have a section that everyone can contribute to.  Groups can be of any size and students can be in more than one group.  The groups can also change as needed, so if you need to shuffle a person to a different group, once you do the permissions are changed to reflect their new position. Inside of each team's section group are the regular sections for Assignments, Marking (that is private to ...

A friend asked the following on Facebook so I thought I'd provide my response to promote discussion more generally. Who all is in a one-to-one tablet school? How's that going? Use them daily? Weekly? Monthly? Blue-moonly? Curious if the tablets are making a difference or just a thing. I'm going to make the distinction between a tablet (iPad or Android slab) and a tabletPC (Microsoft Surface Pro or Dell Latitude, amongst others). The former are really personal consumption devices and their long-term viability in a classroom are limited relative to the latter, which are desktop replacements. You will likely see more success through implementing BYOD with student personal mobile devices (i.e. smartphones) than with a 1:1 slab program. We only saw intensive & continual up-take and use of technology by faculty & students when we moved to a pen-based tabletPC which allowed for free-form input (i.e. "writing") on a digital surface with sufficient comput...

So I was sitting in the Faculty Lounge yesterday (as I am as much as I can... see It's too far ...) and I was chatting with a Social Studies teacher.  She was asking about the Microsoft conference I had attended last week where I had the opportunity to share our story with folks from across the Americas.  She wanted to make sure I knew that she was thrilled with the OneNote Binder (our super-charged version of Microsoft's OneNote Class Notebook ).  And then she said You know, when I first came to our school I noticed some math & science teachers using OneNote and asked about it in my department and was told by my colleagues 'You don't want to use OneNote, it's too hard' . I, of course, cringed.  But then I asked her why she changed her mind and was now a big fan of OneNote. She said I went on maternity leave [the year we introduced the Binder] and when I came back, everyone was using the OneNote Binder and it was just so easy!  I noticed how one of o...

At Appleby College, we've been using Microsoft OneNote for a l.o.n.g time now ... and structured shared OneNote Binders for two full academic years now.  Folks often ask how much time it takes for teachers to get accustomed to working with OneNote and shared documents in general.  Since we have the advantage of a 1:1 tablet program and a background with the software, it's hard to be fair when describing how long it takes for teachers to become comfortable enough to use it in the classroom in front of students and to bend it to their pedagogical and administrative needs. Well, we started using OneNote last week at the Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI) to help with professional development creation.  Of the 50 or so participants, only a handful had used it before and for the vast majority it was brand new to them.  So far, they've spent 8 hours using OneNote and shared collaborative Word documents & PowerPoint presentations through OneDrive and the WebA...

We got great news today... Microsoft Office Labs  have released an app for Sharepoint2013 that will create a OneNote notebook for your class very similar to what we use at Appleby ! The direct link to the Store is  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/store/onenote-setup-tool-for-teachers-WA104313551.aspx This is a great first step forward -- it brings the collaboration and planning to any teacher with access to a Sharepoint2013 server.   Our next goal is to make it work on Sharepoint Online  (it works on Sharepoint online, too!)-- and distribute it in a way that doesn't require purchase and maintenance of an online space by the teacher.   Our pitch at the 2014 Microsoft Global Forum is, piece-by-piece, slowly coming to fruition.

So this post is prompted by Dave Sladkey's post earlier on using Google Drive, namely Google Drive! What are you waiting for Math Teachers? Now Google Drive/Google Docs has much greater visibility than Microsoft OneNote and even though I'm a long-time GDocs/Drive user I would likely recommend the OneNote Notebook approach over the GoogleDrive.  But I realized that maybe folks didn't know how easy it was to set something up. Thus... Go to OneNote.com and, if you don't already have a Microsoft account, sign up for one. Click on CREATE and choose OneNote Notebook Now, you can think of a OneNote Notebook as a "Google Drive Folder".  It has Sections (like Google Drive Subfolders) and Pages (like Google Drive Files).  But these pages can contain anything.  And I mean anything.  They're like wiki pages in that you can drop text, images, links to other pages, you can embed files & videos... you name it! After you're done playing with it (and yo...

We had a really successful year last year when we rolled out the OneNote Binders ... and now we've responded to some of the feedback as we prepare to provide this year's version. Students have become accustomed to using the Assignments Section to submit their work; it's the Section that forms their assignment dropbox for the course.  In order to minimize the horizontal space used by the tab's names, we've renamed Assignments  as _A with the underscore character to keep it alphabetically at the far left. We've done the same thing with the former Assessed Section -- it's been renamed _R .  The Assessed (or now, _R eturned) section is the read-only space for students and parents to see their marked work -- they can see all the Pages of content that are placed in this section by the teacher but can't edit it.  They can, of course, copy it back out to their sections and make changes and resubmit it to the Assignments section. And the big change...

I have the incredible good fortune to watch a French teacher work over the next month.  She's taken on the responsibility for a Grade 10 French summer course for students.  The challenge is that she is teaching it online to students here in Canada and overseas, specifically China and Pakistan.  They are all existing students in our school that are trying to get ahead in our French program -- that's important because they are already familiar with the technology commonly used in our school.  While many school leverage the learning management system, the OneNote Binder has given her a way to not only structure her content but closely observe and provide feedback on every student's work from minute to minute. She is using Lync as her communication medium; this has been our one technological learning curve but both she and the students have been learning fast.  Lync is one of Microsoft's products so it is closely integrated into our email, Sharepoint and networ...