Continuous formation

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 picture à propos of nothing, except perhaps the recognition of the dying days of a teacher's summer vacation One of the major aspects of my job (and admittedly, one of my favourites) is finding ways to smooth out wrinkles in our systems.  To find efficiencies.  To save time.  It's mathematical, really ... if I can save 2 minutes off a teacher's day, in a staff of 100 that's 3 hours of time that can be better spent. We've made a lot of progress during the 2012-2013 but, to use a phrase I hate, we hit a lot of the low-hanging fruit.  The easy things.  We centralized and synchronized the OneNote Binders (okay, that was huge), the Faculty Calendar and the Duty Calendars so that they were done once and everyone could access and modify as necessary. We simplified the way teachers access and use information produced from the school's student information system, removing a tonne of roadblocks. We moved PD online and made it instantaneous.  There have been ...

Last year's introduction of shared OneNote Binders to our school really provided more fluid communication between teacher and student -- because there was anytime, anywhere, "any media" access to all of the student and teacher notes there is now a continual flow of contents and comments back and forth.  It's really starting to reshape assessment for & as learning . We had wanted the parents in the mix from the beginning but in order for the parents to see the inking done by the student and teacher, they had to have the OneNote program installed on their system.  Now, many of them likely do (and don't know it) but there is a minority running Macs and other parents want to be able to check on things from their offices where they may not have OneNote.  The 2010 OneNote web app didn't allow for seeing ink so was essentially useless.  Since one of the major leaps forward with tablet pcs is that students and teachers are not limited in the means by which t...

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...

As we continue to prepare for the coming academic year (we don't start classes until the week after Labour Day) I've begun to prepare the data for the Faculty. One of the introductions last year was the "Duty Calendar" -- who does residential duty each night, both faculty and prefects (student leaders).  In the past, it was stored in five different spreadsheets, one for each house and then one for the entire campus (since on weekends, faculty members are assigned to the campus rather than specific houses during the day Saturday & Sunday).  No one from other houses knew who was doing duty in any other house and if swaps were made, folks were never really sure that the change had been made.  Now, although the data starts out on a spreadsheet (I configure a spreadsheet for the House Directors) it is then copy-and-pasted into a Sharepoint Calendar.  3 clicks and 2 key-presses for each spreadsheet and the information is available to all. To be precise, it is paste...

Well, I've nudged some middle managers forward. While OneNote is the major collaborative space that we use here at School, it's not the most comfortable working environment for folks groomed on Word, Excel and Powerpoint. We have in the past used GoogleDocs for the collaborative building of projects but many people are uncomfortable with the simultaneity of editing.  The regular Microsoft Office programs do allow for asyncrhonous sharing of documents when tied with Sharepoint.   So I passed on the following bit of knowledge to a few of our managers who are working on a couple of projects: Go to a Document Library on one of your Sharepoint Sites In the Documents ribbon at the top of the screen you have a New Document button.  It comes with Word and we can add Excel, Powerpoint and other common programs.  Let's say we click on Word... It opens up Word on the tablet and you can write your document. When you finally hit Save (or Exit) you are encourage...

Teachers try to be efficient with their use of time; like first responders, teachers are dealing with situations that are often dealt with immediately, in the moment. They want to provide opportunities for students to show their learning, and then provide meaningful feedback, planning and differentiating along the way. Things that get in the way are quickly discarded -- by necessity. So that brings me to Sharepoint. Two stumbles arrived today: 1) We're using a discussion board in one of our courses. Now, to be fair, the students and teachers are learning how to use a discussion board correctly. Some students were writing their reflections in Word and uploading an attachment to the Board. That's not good board etiquette and its something that's being discussed. But to make matters worse, Sharepoint's out-of-the-box discussion board hides the attachment from the viewer: you see a small paperclip icon and then have to click twice to get to the Word document. I...

One of my biggest goals this year has been to ensure that people have the information they need, when they need it in the form that they find usable. We've made some great steps forward using Excel to re-package a lot of the information held by our Student Information service (and held is the operative word -- it's locked in there quick tightly). Faculty have been able to use the information to involve students and parents more in day-to-day student life, academics and co-curriculars. And they've been doing a lot more analysis on formative and summative grades to find patterns, differentiate instruction and improve assessments. Another big step is redesigning Sharepoint to make certain that information is stored and presented in an organized way. Over the years, Sharepoint has grown in a haphazard way and users haven't really been made aware of how they can control their experience with the tools built in to it. Admittedly, it's not the most user-friendly sy...

The School has been trying to leverage OneNote and its sharing and syncing capabilities ever since OneNote was introduced in 2003 ... in a 1:1 tablet computer environment it's a natural fit for both teachers and students. Each page that is created can hold any kind of digital content and can be inked with as much freedom as a piece of paper. There is an organization that is familiar to those in education -- you start at pages, put pages into sections (I always think of those Hilroy separators) and then the sections into notebooks... except being digital there are no limitations (you can include audio, video, PDFs, etc) and the tablet doesn't increase in weight the more pages you add. There have been difficulties with OneNote along the way -- although OneNote was capable of sharing a notebook between folks (so that more than one person could write on it at a time) and synchronize from a copy stored on a central server (so that you material could be in a central cloud and y...