Continuous formation

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...

So I'm already prepping for next year and putting together the Staff OneNote ... I managed to convince the three Academic Directors and the three School Directors (vice principals) to merge their separate OneNotes into one.  (Yay, small victories!)  If you haven't played with Staff Notebooks, visit https://www.onenote.com/staffnotebookedu -- it's free for schools & teachers. That's great!  Except when you make a Staff OneNote, and assign a co-teacher, they don't get a Section Group for themselves to work in.  And the Academic Directors have to do some School (social/advisory) work and vice-versa. I set the Staff OneNote up with me as the Leader and added all of the Faculty.  So that gave Section Groups to everyone except me.  Now, I had to add the six Directors to be able to add material to the Content Library.  To do that, I brought back my blog post from last year So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook   Fortunately, S...

[[Part 2 of this article is here: Link] ] So when I was visiting  Anna in Edinburgh  during March Break, she showed me how she used Password-Protected OneNote sections within the OneNote ClassNotebook to help students check their work -- she set the password to the correct answer, so they knew they had it right when the Section opened up. I figured I could use this for Math Review, so I set aside a couple of hours (turned out to be 3 hours but a fair chunk of that was solution-time) the other night to put an Exam Review together for my Grade 10 Mathematics course.  I pulled together as many multiple choice questions and short answer questions on the topics as I could Google and tried to balance each Section with a mix of topics and then threw in a couple of pop-culture questions, too.  The students worked on the problems in each section and used the answers as passwords to unlock the next section until they got to the Prize section. Result?  Near to...