Continuous formation

So my new year's resolution is to write one blog post a week. I thought I would start off by answering a question I was asked during #PubPD in October.  Now, #PubPD is a fun evening where teachers gather together in a local pub and over the course of an hour, we discuss questions posted to Twitter, alongside teachers in pubs around the world.  During the dinner that preceeded us discussing the questions posted on Twitter, Melinda Lula , our Hamilton #PubPD organizer asked me " What is your classroom like? " ... and I never really got around to answering that question.  So I'll do that here. My first statement would be that I don't religiously follow any approach or pedagogy; I think it's important to be agnostic in education since, unlike math or physics, we can't know 'best' or 'right' (we do know wrong , obviously, and I don't go there).  I'm not a bandwagon guy (okay, maybe OneNote, but that's like being in favour of havin...

This was a recent question posted amongst school educators G suite versus Office 365. Thoughts? Since I wrote a fair bit, I thought I'd also post it here: If people are learning with a modern pen-based tablet pc, or are learning math, science, or languages outside of the QWERTY keyboard, then it is Office365 specifically because of Microsoft OneNote. There is nothing in the Google Suite that provides a 360 degree flexible, open digital learning environment. However, that flexibility & openness does require a bit more work on training for novices (and some handholding for those teachers who aim pedagogically for a, umm, less-than-21st century and/or paperless classroom) . I cannot teach without it, and its use has improved instruction and assessment school wide. I have experienced that Google Classroom is really good at structured (and perhaps inflexible) document management, given its genesis on top of Google Drive. Teachers also seem dependent on a collection of 3rd party...

We're just prepping for the start of the school year (we don't start teaching until the 12th) and I just thought I'd run through how enmeshed Microsoft OneNote is to our school. 1) Class OneNotes -- this is where it all started five years ago, so we have over 2500 Class Notebooks in our archive.  Each year, we run a script against our timetable and a Class Notebook is created for every class, with a Teacher Content Library section group (including a private planning space), a Group Collaboration Space section group (with a wide-open collaborative space along with the opportunity to add additional small-group spaces at the teacher's whim), and a section group for each student (with appropriate student assignment dropbox, private teacher marking space and a returned section which the student can't edit for marked work.  This is all spelt out here here and here . But then there are all the other places we use OneNote that I thought we should mention. 2) Depa...

Taking a brief break from my "Getting Started with OneNote Class Notebook" series (you can start that one here )... This is a little advanced so if you're not comfortable setting permissions inside of Office365 you may want to avoid this.  Or set up a Class Notebook to play with so that it doesn't affect any existing Class Notebooks.  Yeah, the latter is a good option. One of the great powers of OneNote is that you can do some really neat permissioning of the Section Tabs. When the Notebook is created, of course, it gives you an "open permissions" on the Collaboration Space and student-read-only on the Content Library.  And then each student space is wide open to each individual student. But we've found that occasionally you want to mix up the permissions a little.  For example, you could create a space in a student section for your private notes that the student couldn't see, or maybe you want a tab in the Collaboration Space that students cou...

When we were creating the precursor to the OneNote Class Notebook, I was heavily influenced (well, I still am) by the work of Black & Wiliam and so improving the quality and quantity of formative assessment is cooked right into the Notebooks.  Likely the whole reason the Class Notebook exists in  its present structure in the first place is because of quotes like this from "I nside the Black Box ": Feedback to any pupil should be about the particular qualities of his or her work, with advice on what he or she can do to improve, and should avoid comparisons with other pupils. (Black & Wiliam, p.6) And so we have a private area for the student to do all of their work that only they and their teacher can see, and in which the teacher is easily able to provide feedback in written, typed, pictorial, audio or video formats at any time. Microsoft went a step further with their Class Notebook AddIn to make the process a lot easier. Let's say you distributed one ques...

In the previous post Distributing content in your Class Notebook , I went through the steps of distributing a page to each of my students (effectively handing out what I wanted them to look at).  What's nice is that it doesn't involve any email - everything stays captured within OneNote. It's sometimes easier to see that in action, so here's a screen recording of that process, first creating a new section in each of my students' areas (calling it Unit 1) and then putting a copy of the problem to work on in each of their Unit 1s. So far we've done: Creating your first OneNote Class Notebook The first page of your Class Notebook Putting content in your Class Notebook --- this post Facilitating Feedback in OneNote (Review Student Work)

Regardless of your teaching style, you're going to want to provide students with content - articles to read, worksheets to practice, diagrams to explore, maps to color, etc.  While OneNote allows the students complete freedom in constructing content within their own space, you as the teacher will want to give them things to work on or at least consider.  That's the topic for today -- "handing out". For me, anything I hand out first gets stored in the Content Library - I want to be able to place the material in the right section and in the right page order to give it context to a student looking over the totality of the course.  If it's differentiated (i.e. not every student gets the same thing) we can use subpages, color or tags to provide that information to the student.  And this is personal and not policy, I always want to make sure that every student has access to the full breadth of content regardless of where they may be working and provide a structure tha...