Skip to main content

"So you've sold your soul..."

While at the Bringing-IT-Together conference (one of the best gathering of learners in North America) in November 2015 I had the opportunity to present at a few sessions, mostly on OneNote (of course?) but I also got to work with some folks from Microsoft and, in recognition of being a Microsoft Education Fellow and Innovative Expert Educator and my school being a Microsoft World Tour School, they gave me an amazingly red t-shirt with the image below on the back.
I'm not one for "labels" (Distinguished Educator, Certified Innovator... all those pretentious, self-aggrandizing badges from various companies... what was the SmartBoard one?) .  I'm not a fan of wearing corporate labelling, either, and am regularly removing tags, flags and the like from my clothing.  And except for PCMI, I'm not one for t-shirts at all (I used to have to wear a collared shirt to sit at the dinner table), but I was very humbled that our Microsoft Canada Education rep Lia De Cicco-Remu had gone to the effort of recognizing our contributions that I wore the shirt the second day of the conference.  And I liked the way the artist had brought a lot of important ideas together into one design -- I shall track down her name.
But sure enough, friends noticed and one of them said "So you finally sold your soul to Microsoft, eh?"  I replied as I have whenever my enthusiasm (or my wardrobe) emphasized a particular company's product -- I will sleep with anyone who produces a better learning experience for my students.  I will push them out of the bed, though, if something better comes along,  For the past eight years, right now, for the foreseeable future, Microsoft has been bringing their A-game, first with OneNote on a pen-based tablet computer (okay, and then we ran with it) and now the on-going development around Office365.  There is nothing better on the market for the learning that goes on in, around and beyond our School.  Not a day goes by that a different teacher (or staff member ... they're on board now too) expresses to me how one aspect of Office365 has made learning more visible, deeper, easier, more collaborative or their job/life more interesting, quicker, better.  Microsoft Canada has been incredibly supportive and their staff are nothing short of amazing. 
So I'm quite happy to sleep with them.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Desmos, OneNote & Replay

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 refr
11 comments
Read more

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

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
27 comments
Read more

Escape Room / BreakOut in OneNote

[[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 total continual engagement
4 comments
Read more