Continuous formation

So yesterday I mentioned about using Teams to do Screencasts - you can see that blog post by clicking here .  Here's a brief run-down of the process. When you're in the Teams application, either as a reply to a message, or a brand new conversation, click on the MEET NOW button.  It looks like a little video camera. You'll get Teams Meeting popping up... you'll be doing a call, but of course, there's no one on the other end.  Type in a Subject -- I'd choose the Course, Textbook, page and question number if it's applicable, otherwise some combination of curriculum standard. Click on MEET NOW to being the meeting.  We want to start recording in order to get the video part of the screencast.  Click on the 3-dot menu button and choose START RECORDING.  (It says "Preview" because recording is still in pretty active development -- see below).  The recording has now started and you'll see the red icon in the upper right of the screen. Now...

I was thrilled that this year the Math Department has decided to move fully on to Microsoft Teams to provide Math Extra Help.  While we'll continue to provide face-to-face drop-in help during lunch, students in any course can post a question on the Math & CS Team , in whichever channel corresponds to their course. Microsoft Teams is freely available to everyone so any school (or individual teacher!) can give this a try.  If you already have Office365 it should be an option (although your IT department may have turned it off!  If you don't see it, ask!).  Anyone can sign up for their own Teams space just by clicking on the link above. Microsoft Teams, in case you haven't encountered it yet, is a conversation space that brings in all manner of collaboration options.  Picture an organized Facebook.  Within each conversation space, you get a file space too (picture a "google drive" attached to every Whatsapp group, say) along with being able to plug i...

It often takes folks a bit to get used to OneNote because there are no "files" -- there are only pages, like a Binder, and everything is placed on a page.  So, when students do their work and present it for feedback, it's on a page.  What's great is you don't have to find, open and manage all those files -- all the student work is already stored & organized inside of OneNote for you. When it comes to group work, we have the same luxury. In the Collaboration Space, I create a Section for the activity -- usually I title it with the date and the name of the activity. Then, I create the first page (or two) with the instructions for the activity ( Opening Day Activity in the example above -- we start in the Collab on Day One so they can get used to "playing" inside the OneNote) and any templates or rubric as subpages ( How to give feedback and CopyThisPage in the example above). Each group (or each student -- this work for individual activ...

Now, as a math teacher, "differentiation of product" means something completely different... but for this purpose it means -- don't expect every student to respond to your request for evidence of understanding with the same learning artefact. This is well stolen from Vanderbilt University (https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/di/cresource/q2/p07/ ) Now, even as a first year teacher way back in the 90s before I really knew about differentiation of product, I encouraged students to present their mathematics projects as diversely as possible.  But OneNote has truly given them complete freedom and ease of submission. Inking  -- first & foremost, student mathematical work tends to be handwriting.  Most of my students don't know LaTeX (although I have had a few of my students, from Grade 9 and up, learn it once they were told it existed and was what 'real' mathematics authors use.  Interestingly, OneNote (and Word & PowerPoint) supports LaTeX .  ...

So, as I'm getting ready for our training for new Faculty I thought I'd put together the steps for making a survey or collecting data. You can see some of my other posts on Microsoft Forms by clicking the link . 1. VISIT http://forms.microsoft.com and sign in with your Office365 ID/password.  Or click on the FORMS button in the Waffle.  Or click the FORMS button if you're in OneNote. Remember that you or your School can sign up for Office365 for free. Button in OneNote Button on the Office365 Waffle 2. To keep this short, I'll only be covering Forms part of Microsoft Forms, where you just collect data without "grading" or "providing feedback".  There's a whole Quiz part of Forms that I'll cover later.  Too much all at once.  So, CLICK on "New Form" or, if you already have a Form, click on its card. (You may also have Forms that have been Shared With You or Forms that you have access to as part of an existing Group, s...

Sooo... we do everything in OneNote. I mean, everything (see here: Link ). So the problem was, we were having OneNotes for everything and it just got to be too much.  Instead, we set up a School OneNote ClassNotebook for administrative use.  Every teacher is a "student" in the ClassNotebook (except for me as the tech guy, and the Principal, who doesn't teach). Yes, we could have use Staff Notebooks but (a) I like keeping things together and (b) the only difference is nomenclature. Microsoft should have just changed the ClassNotebook content to reflect leaders/learners rather than have two mechanisms.  But hey, they don't always listen to me :) Once I have the Notebook set up, I make some Sections and Section Groups in the Content Library. The first is the Faculty Handbook, followed by some School specific content.  My Section Group for all tech things, is titled with an Underscore character( _ ) so that it is always listed first in the Section Group listing. ...

Growing up we had a huge book of poetry in the house, and I remember reading it regularly.  One that I remember is from Longfellow ... and it applies to this situation. I have the pleasure of working with the folks at the Park City Mathematics Institute this summer. What happens is that for 2 hours in the afternoon we work together on a project. In the past, I've introduced folks to OneNote and, although it takes them about 6-8 hours to get use to the interface and environment, it usually turns out pretty well. So this year, the obvious thing was to bring Microsoft Teams into the space and leverage its capabilities.  I had used it at school with my classes and it worked out really well.  It has a slick interface, brought in some AI, connected to every bit of content you'd ever wanted... in short, at school it added a lot to the classroom. So I thought it would work really well as we worked on our project. I was wrong. So. Incredibly. Wrong. It was a disaster. A comp...