Continuous formation

So Twitter serves up a lot of great tips, tricks, techniques and shortcuts for busy teachers. Choosing to follow the right folks helps prevent a lot of the nonsense. Eric Curts ( Twitter ) provided one to help Math teachers with quick formative assessments : Making Google Forms Quizzes with Math (Free, Easy, and Quick) . It's just as free, quicker and easier with Microsoft Forms ... and remember that Microsoft is free to all schools, teachers & students. So Eric wanted to make this problem below into a self-marking Quiz.  He had to use a separate app to create the math, change it into an image and then paste the URL to get the Math into Google Forms.  With Microsoft Forms, it's all included -- reduces the workload considerably! From Eric Curts (@ericcurts) Visit https://forms.office.com and click on Getting Started and log in with your School Microsoft Account. Don't have a School Microsoft Account?  Again, it's free for schools, teachers & students -...

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...

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...

One of our participants here at the Park City Mathematics Institute asked me how we did student feedback at our school; I wrote him an email but thought I'd illustrate it a bit more here: So, we have a little bit of a unique situation at our school. We use OneNote for almost all student content.  We have a notebook for each course section and then it's specially designed so that the teacher's section is visible but not editable by the students/parents and then each student has a section that only they, their parents and the teacher can edit.  You can see a few of our support videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/ playlist?list= PLcVuAxNuOfQ5OdlYDMBFa9bgsavLP CtBs   So for feedback, I can go in and write (pen-based tablet) any comments I want directly on their work (in real time, collaboratively, during class or at home after they've done their homework).  We also have them do some of their homework as a screencast, so they send me a link with the video of ...

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 mentioned it in yesterday's blog post and realized I hadn't discussed it before. I had done a presentation on line with Lync and although Lync does do recordings, the presentation was pretty dynamic with questions coming from the participants.  In order to make the presentation efficient for folks who couldn't attend, I used Present.Me to not only show the slides but also show me as I discussed the content. Well, it turned out that Present.Me was a big hit amongst the faculty (not like that wasn't my ulterior motive, eh?)  The Physical Education department used it in the Middle School for the student presentations on health topics almost immediately. I've found this introduction-by-stealth to be the best way of providing faculty with new ways of looking at information.  Giving them a link or even doing a video on a new application really does work... not surprisingly (thank you Dewey) actually showing them how it works in a context pushes their thinking and doi...

Well I've spent a considerable amount of time responding to the feedback on Wallwisher; the students have definitely found it convenient to have a space to voice their concerns.  While I began it as place to talk about improvements to our OneNote Binder system, the students definitely did not feel limited to that initial suggestion.  At all.  Questions ranged from OneNote, to Outlook, to Windows 8 and then into the history of OneNote.  And a few diversions into internet memes.  Okay, I put my share of wood on that fire in my responses. And I thought it important to respond to each note -- they were asking legitimate questions, good questions, that they either hadn't heard the answer to yet (and for sure IT has been sending a consistent message on many of their issues) or we weren't even aware of the problem. I have to say that Padlet provided a great space for this... as moderator I could edit notes to add my comments and group notes around similar themes as ...