Continuous formation

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 we had a snow day Monday.  I won't go in to the gloriousness that a snow day is here in Canada.  Suffice it to say that they're as close to heaven as you can get without dying. It came at a cost; there was 35cm of snow across my neighbourhood.  My neighbours are not teachers, they tend to be young families or retired folks -- so when I get a snow day, I grab my shovel and start clearing the snow from their driveways and steps.  I know how privileged I am to get the day free and not have to drive, slowly and dangerously, to work on snow-covered roads. As I was shoveling through five different driveways, I was using my phone to play music.  I kept getting this buzz of messages coming in, though... which is unusual on a snow day.  It turned out that students, safely tucked away at home, were using Yammer (our conversation space) to ask and answer math questions unbidden by their teachers! Now, we had great success at Christmas prior to exams as students ...