Microsoft Tips

As an MIE Expert I am lucky to attend some amazing sessisons with other MIEs and with Microsoft staff. We had a Microsoft Teacher Talk in Christchurch where we were given an overview of Microsoft products and the chance to throw some ideas around.
Having used most of these products for a while, I didn't take copious amounts of notes, but as always there were a few tips that I found really useful and wanted to share with others, so here they are.

OneNote - I use this all the time, but am always learning something new.

• You can pull text out of an image by right clicking on the image and right at the bottom there is "Select Text from Image". I didn't see it there when I had the Onetastic addin disabled, so you may need to download and enable it to have this option.
• Use the Learning Tools Dictate feature to scribe audio from a video. Run the video on YouTube while recording and it will write the text for you.
• If you right click an image and "Set Picture as Background" you can annotate it without it moving around.
• Don't forget to use the Audio recording for feedback. You can annotate at the same time and it links the audio to the annotations. If you are having problems with work on multiple pages, go to File>Options>Advanced>Printout and untick the "Printouts on Multiple Pages" box.
• Remind students to copy their written work before they highlight or make changes, then you can see the progression.
• In the Class Notebook you can distribute sections and pages to a small group within your class.
• You can add a Teacher only section to an aleady made Class Notebook. Under Class Notebook go to Manage Notebooks, choose your note book and Enable Teacher-Only Section.
• Use OneNote for Teacher Appraisal.
• Only comment for improvement is it would be nice to have the full functionality of the Word spell check within OneNote.

OfficeMix - I haven't used this yet, but some of my colleagues have, with good success. Keen to have a closer look when I get some time.

• Download this  into Powerpoint - not available for Mac yet.
• If you write in the notes section of your Powerpoint, these will come up when you record, so you can read them while you record.
• If you want to take a small section of a video, you can do a Screen Record into your powerpoint, or you can right click and save it as a short clip for later use.
• When you upload to OfficeMix make sure you save the settings for students to sign in, then you will get analytics.

Snip   - I use this all the time, and love it!

• Download and have it sitting on the side or top of your screen for easy use.
• Use it to create little snips to explain short concepts.
• Great for annotation of screen clippings.
• Use the whiteboard to draw on then save.
• The library in Snip saves all your snips for quick access.

Sway - love this alternative for presentations

• Great for collaboration of Authors.
• You can share and enable students to duplicate your Sway so they can add to it. Share>More Options> Duplicate.
• Drag and drop photos in to make a quick newsletter for parents and community.
• Good for portfolios. Can show the before and after of art work with the slider.
• Use like a blog for a school trip, share with parents so they can keep updated.
• You can use this offline, download the app from the store.
• It is Mac friendly, but one teacher mentioned that students couldn't edit on their phones.

Classroom and Teacher Dashboard - a quick discussion was had about both of these, although no-one was using in any depth. Definitely in the beta stage where we are experimenting and seeing what works. It was good to hear that Microsoft have been working with KAMAR to get these linked together.

Tasks - This looks good to use when planning a group event such as Prizegiving or a production. Good to be able to allocate tasks to staff. It would be good to be able to allocate tasks to more than one person.

Forms - I have done a couple of surveys and quizzes using Forms - so far so good.

• You can now add points to questions.
• You can turn the link into a QR code which I like.
• Great for surveying the community.
• Good visuals - yu can see it updating if you do it live.
• You can export as a spreadsheet.
• You can delete a particular student response, if you have set the survey for students to sign in.
• A few things that are still needed - the ability to co-author, to duplicate and to stop people voting more than once.

Educator Community - I have learnt so much on this site!

• Plenty of Courses and Resources.
• Loving the new layout and look.
• The 21st Century Learning Design Pathway comes with it's own OneNote which has rubrics to code your activities to see how well you are using tehnology.
• There are webinars to watch.
• It's a good idea to use your home email to sign up, this makes it easier if you change schools. 

I ran a quick session on using StaffPad - an amazing app for SurfacePro that is a great tool for teaching music. 

Overall, a great session and I have a few more tips and tricks to add to my bag. I am keen to give OfficeMix a go - that will be a holiday project.

Teach Meet Christchurch

What a great afternoon. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to be in a room full of keen and motivated teachers who wanted to learn and wanted to share. This is my brief summary of the session, mainly for my own review, but there were a few things that I thought might interest others, so here it is in public.

Wilj Dekkers from STAC - Minecraft for Creative Writing

http://eblog.stac.school.nz/2014/11/28/creative-writing-with-onenote-minecraft/ 

Wilj started by showing us a clip, The Piano , that he uses for students to be inspired to write about. I loved this idea and wished, just for a short moment, that I taught English so I could use this.

He talked about creating a Kiwiana theme park where students used Minecraft to create it and then they shared their learning with parents.

Picture by hobbymb

Using Pick a path stories, the students would write a story,  then create the world in Minecraft and then review the story. He found that using Minecraft helped write more content and more quality.

This year he has done this the other way. The students have made a rough sketch, then planned the story with Minecraft. He has seen the increase in motivation.

Maybe I do want to teach English....  no, maybe not.

Tom Neumann  - Riccarton - Using an alphanumeric self marking video game in Moodle to review content of Yr11 Economics (or any other subject)

www.tomadi.net.nz

Tom showed us a video of how he uses games for learning.

He has found that students are fully engaged and have total concentration for games. He says that they will keep trying to achieve, which I have seen before with gamification - suddenly students are not as worried about failing, they just keep trying until they get it right.

Using games and music for learning definitely strikes a chord with many students. I would like to investigate this further when I get time.

Sue McLachlan - Hagley - OneNote Learning Tools. 

I am passionate about these and feel they have a huge potential for classroom use. This was my presentation so I didn't take notes...
My Sway (awesome Office365 tool for presentations) can be found here.

Karen Gray - Haeata - Personalisation of Learning

Karyn talked about Personalization/Differentiation/Individualization and designing learning programmes that are flexible and responsive. It must be very exciting starting a new school with a clean slate to work from. She had many questions to ask of us as well and this is a great forum to share ideas.

#BFC630NZ - breakfast chat on Twitter at 6.30am each morning that is worth looking at. I may have to rearrange the shower order in our house so I can get to one of these, otherwise I will be a lurker and check them out later in the day.

She also talked about using the best device for the learning at the time rather than using 1:1

I loved the quote she used at the end:

John Holt - a perceptive educationalist

‘It would be to let every child be the planner, director of his own education, to allow and encourage him with the inspiration and guidance of more experienced and expert people, and as much help as he asked for, to decide what he has to learn, when he is to learn it, how he is to learn it, and how well he is learning it. It would make our schools,..... a resource for free and independent learning, which everyone in the community, of whatever age, could use as much or as little as he wanted.’

Tam Proctor - OneNote as a teacher planner

http://tamypblog.blogspot.co.nz/

As I use OneNote all the time, this wasn't new to me, but a couple of things were reminders for me to look into. Using templates - I really don't do this enough. also, being able to hyperlink to other pages is something I need to look into. I also need to use tick boxes more.

For each class, she plans with 3 sections - Content, Observations and Reflections. A good habit to get into.

Shira Withers - Our Lady Star of the Sea - How we as educators can help students with low working memories improve their self-management skills using digital technologies, thus  allowing them to experience success and move from a fixed to growth mindset.

http://mindlabassessments.blogspot.co.nz/

For self-management skills, Shira has the students using Trello. She also uses colour coded Google Slides Timetable in which they can add a daily or end of week reflection. This helps students to stay focussed.

Tony Ryan's thinking keys

She mentioned Tony Ryan's Thinking Keys which I hadn't heard of.

Donna Jones -STAC - Using a 3D app to inspire creative thought and ideas for creative writing. Primary and secondary.

Donna showed us the app Quiver, which you can download for free onto your phone. You print off pictures from http://quivervision.com/ colour them in then use the app which will bring them to life.

She says that the student's writing gone to another level as they can see things in 3D.

She uses it for fantasy writing, science and geography as well. A great tool to inspire students.

I've gone mad on this. I loved the colouring in for a start, then had a great time showing everyone how it worked! I even coloured my Pukeko with black and white stripes to make sure it really did render the colours that I had chosen. It looks very cool! Some of the pictures cost, but there are many free ones to try this out. This has huge possibilities and I can see it being a very useful app. The next step is to see if we can commission specific graphics for topics....

Sam McNeill - STAC - Google Earth - adding images and doing Google tours

Sam had his students using GoogleEarth to do a tour of the Karate Kid clip. Students made their own tour of places in the movie. One device between groups. He showed us that you can add images to the tour to make it very interactive. This looks like fun - where to next??



Overall, I found this a really inspiring learning experience. Lots to listen to, lots of ideas and motivated, forward thinking teachers. Looking forward to the next one to be hosted at St Andrew’s College on Thursday 11th August starting at 4:15pm. For more information, check out TeachMeet Christchurch. If you can't make it, you can also follow on Twitter #TMChch.