2015 reflection

It's 2016!
I can't believe how quickly the last year went by.
A challenge by Justin Birckbichler, @Mr_B_Teacher, to write a reflective post got me thinking about writing again. I liked his blog and title - Successes, Challenges and Resolutions so I have split this into those categories. The challenge was to do this before the New Year but I managed to start with one of my Resolutions, and have some time out with family, taking a jet boat trip up the beautiful Waimakariri River.

Successes

The School of Apps
This was a new initiative this year and I was reasonably happy with the way it went. It was totally a new learning experience for all involved and we came a long way. I feel this is the way education should be for students and those that did the course were certainly happy with the outcomes. Students were excited, came in frequently after class hours and they were enjoying learning together. More on this in my previous blog Schools within Schools.

Professional Development
I have done a lot more reading and personal Professional Development this year. Joining Twitter and being able to connect with such amazing people with inspiring ideas has been the single biggest motivator for me.
I have relished reading tweets and so many articles and blogs, all of which are helping me to improve my teaching and my ideas.

I have read a large number of books on education as well, with 3 inspiring me to read them many times and bookmarking pages.

Open: How we'll work, live and learn in the future by David Price
Stratosphere: Integrating Technology,Pedagogy and Change Knowledge by Michael Fullan
Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education from the Ground Up by Ken Robinson

Blogging
This is very new for me and I want to thank #EdblogNZ and @nlouwrens for getting me started. It's a great way to reflect on my work and to keep track of what I am doing and why. Looking forward to more challenges over the year.

#MIEExpert
I have been selected to be a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert for 2016 and I am so excited about this opportunity. I have a lot of ideas to help staff and students become more confident in using Office365 at our school, and I am learning a lot myself.

Staff Connections
I have really enjoyed working with 2 particular staff members this year, Andy Gorton and Carmen Kenton. Without these two people in my school, I think I would get frustrated, lack motivation, and I would not be the teacher I am. They feed me, inspire me and encourage me to always be better, think and read more, and push the boundaries. Whenever I feel unmotivated or a bit down, all I have to do is walk into their office or room and suddenly the world is right again. I am forever grateful.

Challenges

School of Apps

Although there were many great things that came out of the School of Apps in 2015, this was the first year and there are a lot of tweaks to make. Due to staffing, we are rearranging the subjects that students will have access to, and we are also getting a new Computing teacher which will mean a different approach in that area as well. The students will get to go to his class to gain help with coding, which I know will be advantageous, as I am limited in that area and struggled with that over the last
year. I am also rearranging the order of projects as some students struggled with the individual project, so I will put an easier one first to get them on track. Looking forward to seeing how this works and if it helps engage students more fully at the beginning of the year.

#Twitter
Using Twitter has been a real challenge! I still am not that confident and frequently google things to work out what I should and shouldn't do. I don't think I have made any really big social blunders, but I'm not sure I am doing things as well as I can yet. It's a steep learning curve and I love it, but I'm still a newbie! I do believe it is a fanatstic tool and I am keen to make the most of it in 2016.
And in breaking news.... I have just found this amazing help sheet - thanks +ariaporo22

Blogging
This is a real challenge for me. Writing is not a strong point of mine. I'm music and maths oriented so it takes me a while to get my thoughts into some sensible order when using words. I was always told I rambled when I wrote, so I have been trying to make things very concise. They tend to come out in bullet points. I use far too many exclamation marks (I have deleted about 6 so far while editing) and have had to edit furiously for each post.

Work/Life Balance
This is a hard one sometimes. I think I am improving on it but I suppose doing work each night between 9 and 11pm is probably not a good balance. My personal life, being a taxi to 2 teenagers with multiple sport and music events, makes it difficult to keep up. It is on the edge at the moment, even to the stage of me pretending that reading books on education and being on Twitter reading articles and participating in chats is actually not work so doesn't count in those hours. Teaching is not a 40 hr week job so maybe the 9pm work time will have to stay for a while. Maybe just not every night...

Technology
I get frustrated trying to encourage other staff to use technology. Many of our staff struggle to even use their email, never mind integrate some sort of technology into the classroom. This is something I would like to change and I am working on setting up PD sessions for staff to help support them and encourage them to try something new.

Resolutions

• I will make my classroom a place where students don't want to leave. I have the opportunity with a new music class this year to make it a vibrant and exciting learning experience. I really want to see how I can do this is in a "traditional" class of just 4 hours a week, not just in the Schools within Schools environment where I have more time and flexibility.

• I will make the most of my MIE Expert role. This means helping others, learning more and getting the most from the support and encouragement of others. Setting up PD sessions at school is just the first step. I want to support staff in their classes and try to help them see the amazing transformation of students when technology is used to support learning.

• I will continue my blog and keep up with professional reading and Twitter. I have really enjoyed the learning I have done this last year and I want to continue this as it inspires me to do more.

• I will be wary of my work/life balance. Making time to do other things for myself that are not work related has to be a priority. I enjoy gardening, music and genealogy, as well as being with my kids, so I am going to set aside time to do some of those each day. Plus more jet boating and swimming in the Waimakariri River.

OneNote hints and tips

There are some really useful little hints and tips I have picked up on my OneNote journey so far that I thought I would share. To put them in context, I use a Surface Pro3 (Windows 8) for work so it is mainly based on the desktop version on there and I am using Firefox. I have an Android phone, so mobile comments are related to that.


Tags - use tags!! I can't believe I didn't use tags. So much easier to find things and to group all the same thread together.


Pin your task bar to the top - saves many clicks!








Sending an email to OneNote - great for putting all those emails somewhere and then keeping everything together and tagging it!

OneNote for Classroom is my teaching lifesaver. See my inquiry blog about how I have used this in the classroom.

Looking forward to being able to embed video when I finally get OneNote2016

Using quick notes - open then drag to the section you want it in.

Did you know there was a built-in calculator? You can do any simple calculation - for example: 35.9*12.19 = and press the space bar for the answer.

Install a clipper in your browser to send a page, region or article directly to your OneNote. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in Edge yet!! It works best with IE as you can clip a selection, not just an article or page as for Chrome and Firefox.

I love using Office Lens on my phone to send photos straight to OneNote. Very useful in lectures or for documents I want to add without having to scan and attach.

And as a bonus for the Windows users - 12 shortcuts every educator should know....

More to come as I do more....

MIE Expert first connection call

Wow - what a buzz. An amazing, inspiring hour from awesome presenters and lots of great ideas and motivation.
I thought I would put a few of the links and ideas here for any #MIEexperts - I am a visual learner so really like things written down!!!
 Some things are specific to MIE Experts (I have put these at the bottom) but a lot are useful for everyone. If you are not signed up at the Microsoft Educator site - you should be! Go there now.
There are some amazing opportunities for anyone to have free online Professional Development.

Check out these educasts. They will be on demand if you can't attend at the time.


If you want to be creative and learn how to use technology to disrupt a boring classroom environment by putting learning in the hands of the students then you need to check out the #hacktheclassroom event.

Get involved in the Skypeathon on Dec 3 and Dec 4 - a great way to be connected.
Even those who are on holiday can participate as guest speakers.

I really enjoyed the session with Rafranz Davis (@rafranzdavis) who is an MIE expertwith great ideas about "Building your brand".

Her advice: Your twitter handle should be your name – own it. She suggests getting a domain name of your own – when someone wants to know who you are, who is better to tell them but yourself. Search yourself – important you know what is being said and what is out there. Check out Rafranz's book "The Missing Voices in EdTech:Bringing Diversity into EdTech". Follow people outside education, follow people who are inspiring. Follow professionals in other fields. Share the work of others. When you read a blog post share it and attribute it. Contribute – teachers feel like what they have to say is not good enough. If you have an idea, share it – it will be new to someone. It is valuable because it came from you  Use tweetdeck People she suggests to follow: #MIEexpert of course!!#IStedepln #Hourofcode @TechChef4u @reginaschaffer @alicekeeler Best platform for starting a blog: Wordpress, Medium is a good platform, has a built in network and can immediately share with twitter. Weebly – students can get free accounts – get a group of people to share codes, you can get credits. Tweet hint – read the tweets of those before you follow them My personal view is that I like Blogger purely because I started on it when writing a blog for school - but you need a Google account for it. I love using Weebly for websites though and many of my students have found it really easy. Some notes specific to MIE Experts: Twitter for Sonja Delafosse https://twitter.com/sdelafosse Social Chorus: Minnia Feng https://twitter.com/minniafeng Email her at mifeng@microsoft.com if you'd like to be featured in Daily Edventures! Social media 101 sway with info in it that we heard today. It takes 24hrs to have the Expert badge show up. New educator community – help to merge partners in learning network with new community Help button – orange one at bottom will do a work ticket to change emails over etc. MIE experts should use the #MIEExpert and the #MSFTEdu hashtag Do local regional face to face meetings with other MIE experts. March 9 – livestream Budapest conference Use Teachmeet to empower educators around you. How are you building a community of teachers in your area to make them amazing? The hour went so quickly - I am just pleased I managed to get some notes and ideas down so I could reflect on them again. I am really looking forward to engaging with everything and everyone.

Using OneNote in the Classroom

My inquiry project for school this year was about using OneNote in the classroom. This is a short summary of what I did and how it worked out. My focus question was:

Does OneNote help students with organisation, note taking and collaboration?

I noticed that students often lose paper, have left notes at home or say they cannot find or access documents. For the School of Apps this year I set up a OneNote classroom notebook and wanted to see if this was a better way for students to be organised and also collaborate together.

I used this as the sole resource document for the class and was trying to have no paper resources where possible. All their resources and their written work was done within the notebook.

I also trialed this in the School of Music, although I was only in there part time.
See my blog on Schools within Schools for how these schools are set up.

My Findings:

I kept a track on how students used the OneNote and what they were using it for as well as putting in resources for them to use.

I surveyed the students from both classes to get feedback on how they found it and what worked well for them over the year. I spoke with students about if they felt it was useful and if they thought it helped with collaboration.

School of Apps:

We used OneNote exclusively as our resource base and also for all collaborative work, and for the students work. From the beginning of the year students were told all their work would be in that one place and that they would use this exclusively. This was for the full 20 hours a week that they were in class.

I found it worked really well in this class. Students were focussed and positive about it and some are now using it for their own personal notes and organisation.

Positives:

•              It gave me a central area to store resources for students. This included video, links, audio – anything I wanted to put there.
•              They had a space to organise work and also to collaborate with each other.
•              I was able to see work they had done at any time and it wouldn’t get lost.
•              I could see what they were doing in English and Business Studies as well – giving an overview of all their subjects, not just technology.
•              Students enjoyed seeing what others were thinking about and what resources they had found and were sharing. They all felt it helped them work productively together.
•              They said it was easy to keep organised titled pages and easy to find. All of them felt it made a difference in the organisation of their schoolwork.

Negatives:

•              Sometimes they felt it was frustrating to navigate, but that it got easier as the year went on.
•              One student felt it needed a better offline version.

School of Music Yr 12 and Yr 13:

My main use for OneNote in Music was for supplying students with links and resources for music theory. Everything I gave them to do was linked into OneNote and all the flash cards and theory sheets were there as well. Answer sheets were loaded on to save on paper and to give them 24hr access.

 I found that OneNote was great in some aspects but not in others within these classes. Some students used it and others didn’t bother. Many just used GoogleDocs and were not motivated to check the theory notes online. Those that used Google Docs said they found it difficult to navigate, while those that just used OneNote said they found it easy and they enjoyed using it. Because I wasn’t using it as frequently with them, and other staff weren’t using it either, I think that they weren’t as used to it as my Apps class were.

Positives:

•             It gave me a central area to store resources for students. This included video, links, audio – anything I wanted to put there.
•             They had a space to organise work and also to collaborate with each other.
•             I was able to see work they had done at any time and it wouldn’t get lost.
•             I could see what they were doing in English and History as well – giving an overview of all their subjects, not just Music.

Negatives:

•       Getting students to write music notation was best done by hand, so resources had to be printed out, although I put most docs online so they could access them if they lost them.
•       Some of the students used the collaborative area in English but said that students were sometimes making silly comments. This would need to be monitored by staff to enable this to work well.
•       A couple of students said they lost work which I found interesting as I haven’t had that happen to me, or to students in the Apps class. I’m not sure that students had a full working knowledge of the application.  
•       I don’t think it will fully work unless other staff use it for all their notes and assignments. If the School of Music is going to go this way, then all staff have to be on board.

Where to from here?

The students who used it frequently and embraced it got a lot from it. It definitely worked in the School of Apps and I will be using the same format for 2016. I will continue to use these with any class I teach and look forward to using it in a different Music class next year to see if it works for all areas of Music, not just theory. I want to use it for reflection of their performances and compositions and also look at other online ways of storing data for students.
I am absolutely certain it helped the Apps students with organisation, note taking and collaboration and believe it could also work in the Music class if more staff were on board.

Using Office365 and OneNote in particular is something I believe we should be using in all classes and with all teachers. Using the student’s school email, using OneDrive to store work, using OneNote for classes and getting students to use all the amazing apps (Video, Sway etc) in Office365 would be great. I am starting this process next week by providing our department with PD in using OneNote so they can all get on board for next year. I am also planning to run PD sessions each week next year to support staff and students.