Continuous formation

When I'm working in OneNote on the night before classes, I always find it interesting to see who else is there working.  The Windows10 version of OneNote (and OneNote Online) both include a People Presence option to show you who else is working in the same Notebook/ClassNotebook.   When you click on the name of the page, you jump there -- so you can work together. While I was doing screenshots, you can see how another student has entered the ClassNotebook, and the first student has moved from one page to another as they do their homework. And then, when I flipped over into our Faculty OneNote , I had one teacher looking at how to send emails to parents for one of her extracurricular programs (in our Tech Help section), while one was working on our Student Leadership Conference and the other two working on incoming pages. While there is an aspect to this of "surveillance", it's meant to energize collaboration.   In the ClassNotebook, it ...

It often takes folks a bit to get used to OneNote because there are no "files" -- there are only pages, like a Binder, and everything is placed on a page.  So, when students do their work and present it for feedback, it's on a page.  What's great is you don't have to find, open and manage all those files -- all the student work is already stored & organized inside of OneNote for you. When it comes to group work, we have the same luxury. In the Collaboration Space, I create a Section for the activity -- usually I title it with the date and the name of the activity. Then, I create the first page (or two) with the instructions for the activity ( Opening Day Activity in the example above -- we start in the Collab on Day One so they can get used to "playing" inside the OneNote) and any templates or rubric as subpages ( How to give feedback and CopyThisPage in the example above). Each group (or each student -- this work for individual activ...

Now, as a math teacher, "differentiation of product" means something completely different... but for this purpose it means -- don't expect every student to respond to your request for evidence of understanding with the same learning artefact. This is well stolen from Vanderbilt University (https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/di/cresource/q2/p07/ ) Now, even as a first year teacher way back in the 90s before I really knew about differentiation of product, I encouraged students to present their mathematics projects as diversely as possible.  But OneNote has truly given them complete freedom and ease of submission. Inking  -- first & foremost, student mathematical work tends to be handwriting.  Most of my students don't know LaTeX (although I have had a few of my students, from Grade 9 and up, learn it once they were told it existed and was what 'real' mathematics authors use.  Interestingly, OneNote (and Word & PowerPoint) supports LaTeX .  ...

Sooo... we do everything in OneNote. I mean, everything (see here: Link ). So the problem was, we were having OneNotes for everything and it just got to be too much.  Instead, we set up a School OneNote ClassNotebook for administrative use.  Every teacher is a "student" in the ClassNotebook (except for me as the tech guy, and the Principal, who doesn't teach). Yes, we could have use Staff Notebooks but (a) I like keeping things together and (b) the only difference is nomenclature. Microsoft should have just changed the ClassNotebook content to reflect leaders/learners rather than have two mechanisms.  But hey, they don't always listen to me :) Once I have the Notebook set up, I make some Sections and Section Groups in the Content Library. The first is the Faculty Handbook, followed by some School specific content.  My Section Group for all tech things, is titled with an Underscore character( _ ) so that it is always listed first in the Section Group listing. ...

So, long story short, we have a bit of extra time in our Right-Angle Trigonometry unit, so I mentioned to my team that I would put together a BreakOut for review.  During this time, we have a lot of kids away for various reasons so having something self-paced is helpful. You can read more about creating BreakOut/EscapeRooms in OneNote on my earlier post here: Escape Room / BreakOut in OneNote - even if you don't use OneNote in your school, you could do this with a Personal OneNote.  All you have to do is create a view-only Share with your class and they can view it online!  Even on their phones! I first made a OneNote Notebook and shared it with the other members of my team. I had hoped that they would contribute but only one jumped on board and added some questions -- not upset though. There's a lot of things that happen at my school, so I just lay out breadcrumbs and see who's hungry enough to follow. In this Notebook, I created 5 Sections - each section is a "R...

So my good friend and colleague Anjuli Ahooja and I were fortunate enough to host a student panel on learning technologies at the STAO (Science Teachers Association of Ontario) and teachers in the audience asked the following questions.  I tried to keep to actual student quotes. "I use Google Classroom... What is the advantage of using OneNote ClassNotebook?" "I've used both ... this [OneNote] is more seamless" "Google is so dependent a lot on internet connection, because they're internet based software and systems they have limited functionality in terms of the things you can be creative with... we're able to do more things" [OneNote works without need for continuous wifi]" "Because you have so many resources at your fingertips, you're able to use them all in one common space... I feel a lot more engaged and I'm a lot more easily able to integrate aspects into one common note instead of having multiple [files]" ...

Last week was crazy busy (3 conferences, report cards and my Dad's memorial service) so I'm catching up on my November committment. As Richard Byrne laid out today in his post, " Voice Recording Tools ", audio can be very effective for both students as content, as product or as feedback from teachers. OneNote doesn't require any additional plug-ins, programs, apps or logins -- you just click INSERT The instant you click on the AUDIO button, it creates an audio file next to your cursor, titles it with the name of the page it's on, and starts recording.  It starts recording the instant you click the button, so be ready!  The instant.  (Ask me how many times I've deleted the audio recording and started again cuz I wasn't ready!) Having Audio incorporated into OneNote makes it really easy to tie audio content to documents.   So easy to give feedback to a student exactly in their work where they need it.  And students can show you they know h...

Scrolling through my Feedly a few weeks ago, I came across a Richard Byrne blogpost describing something called a Hyperdoc , so I read through and thought, hey... they're just describing a OneNote page!  (And I'm old enough to think, "Hey, Webquest!") And so I dug in a little bit more and I found they wrote a whole book about the process, except they called them Hyperdocs and used GoogleDocs to jury-rig things! In OneNote, you really don't need many instructions to do this if you're familiar at all with OneNote.  The overall process is relative straightforward - create a OneNote page, insert a table into it.  In the first column, place all the resources you'd like the students to look through.  The second column is a space for their thoughts on each piece.  The authors have a great collection of Hyperdocs for you to look at here:  https://hyperdocs.co/samples Once you have the template filled out, you can then use the ClassNotebook Tool to distrib...

So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it.  They're collected at  https://teacher.desmos.com/  But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough.  It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss.  Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue.  Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page.  From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working.  I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's...

So Microsoft Teams EDU is a new layer added to Sharepoint/Office365 to make the space workable. Sharepoint/Office365 is ridiculously powerful, but like all ridiculously powerful applications, they need mediation to make them open to the average user.  (For regular OneNote Staff Notebooks, see here:  Nudging the OneNote Staff Notebook Permissions ) When you create a new Team, you choose its type -- Classes (for, you know, classes), PLCs, Staff Members and Anyone.  For PLCs and Anyone, you just get an open OneNote Notebook without any specially permissions sections. When you choose a CLASSES or STAFF MEMBERS teams, a Class or Staff Notebook (respectively) is made with a Collaboration Space (open to all), a Content Library (read by everyone, editable by the owners) and individual private spaces for each member.  Now, I was asked if it's possible to nudge permissions on these Class/Staff Notebooks as I've done in the past. Well... yes and no. The Teams layer doe...

The first part of the story is here: Part 1 . The course I'm teaching runs every day in August, and Sept 1st.  The students return to school after Labour Day and then write their exam at the end of the week (we wanted to make sure we had a properly invigilated exam). I started the course on August 1st in Biloxi, MS, on my way back from Twitter Math Camp in Atlanta -- yes, a bit circuitous because I was on the motorcycle enjoying my holiday (Mississippi was the last of the lower 48 I had yet to visit and I was on my way to riding the Natchez Trace ).  I mention this because I wanted to make sure folks know I started teaching this course under some technical constraints.   It will be easy to look at what I normally have (below) and say "I can't do that/I don't have that" but it's clear you can do it with much less.   Being on the bike, I needed a smaller device than our school tablet and also one that (to be frank) if it got destroyed I wouldn't feel ...

So, although I tried to avoid it, I ended up helping design and am now delivering an online course in mathematics this summer, specifically the Ontario Ministry course MPM2D (Grade 10 Academic).  Fortunately, for the design of the course, I worked with one of the most organized and creative teachers we have on staff - so that part turned out going really well.  (Part 2 of my reflection is here :  Link ) We started off with a shared OneNote so that we wouldn't have to meet face-to-face that often - as it turned out, we met three times for lunch over the month of July and that was enough (we'd worked a lot together earlier so we know each other pretty well).  We ended up breaking the course into half and she took on quadratics and I took on all the other (smaller units) -- the course is predominately parabolas followed by Linear Systems, Analytic Geometry and intro to Right Angle Trigonometry. OneNote worked really well -- she's a (relatively) new Mom so her addi...