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Posts about using Microsoft applications in the classroom
When you think of a note-taking application, you probably think of a simple text and page solution. OneNote 2016 lets you do more with your notes. It also offers more than one way to take notes. Let us look at how you can take notes in OneNote.
Wishing you had an ePortfolio solution for your school district? Imagine being able to create a digital data archive, or digital interactive notebook, where teachers and students can collect evidence of performance by objective. Microsoft OneNote makes all of this possible by providing a private digital storage space that can be jointly accessed by students, parents, teachers, and administrators. ePortfolios have long been an educational pipe dream and now OneNote makes it all possible.
This year the CBE created an Office 365 environment for all the teachers and students. Different applications started to be available during the year: OneDrive, Sway and OneNote amongst others. As a Surface user, I already knew and used OneNote for personal purposes and soon I started to play around with it and discovered a myriad of possibilities for my lessons.
I started to use it and soon it became an essential in my class, especially since I do not have a textbook for Mathematics or Spanish. From all the technological tools that I have used in my career, this one has been the most transforming. These are the main 3 reasons why I love it:
I love Google Chrome. The extensions you can add to your Chrome browser are fab. Sure there are things you can do with Safari, Edge, Firefox… but nothing comes close really to the powerful Chrome browser.One of my new (to me) favourite extensions for Chrome has to be the OneNote Web Clipper extension available via onenote.com/clipper. It is so simple yet so powerful. A truly brilliant productivity tool to make your life as a teacher easier. Simples. To install it just click the ‘Get OneNote Web Clipper’ button on the site and away you go!
Today we’re sharing the results of a new multi-grade 3rd party research study, conducted in Washington State, that shows the positive impact Microsoft Learning Tools can have in the classroom. We’re also sharing some news below on Learning Tools coming to Word for iPad and the Microsoft Edge Browser.The Microsoft Learning Tools set is natively built into the Office 365 and Microsoft Edge applications, and help improve reading, writing and comprehension. The immersive reader capability in Learning Tools, for example, gives users the ability to have content read aloud to them, and lets them adjust settings to break the words into syllables, adjust text size or background colors.
This Week on Windows is all about the brand new Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, including interviews for the new Photos experience, the Mixed Reality Viewer, Mixed Reality head-mounted-displays, a rundown of new gaming features, and much, much more. Check out more about the Windows 10 Fall Creators update at https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexpe...
I have always wished for a Microsoft alternative to PowerPoint. Not that I dislike PowerPoint, but I know students do. Yes of course there are many, many alternatives to PowerPoint. And most are free. However PowerPoint became the industry standard for education and assessment, and as such students must obtain a certain level of understanding with such software. Preparing them for the real working world of course. So many a class involves the dreaded ‘PowerPoint presentation’. Until now that is. Looks like PowerPoint is gently swaying on it’s feet, perhaps about to keel over? Will Microsoft’s followers be swayed by PowerPoint’s new bigger brother? Welcome to Sway.
The inclusion of people with disabilities is integral to Microsoft’s mission to empower every person to achieve more. We celebrate and live this mission each day, from our work on inclusive hiring to inclusive design. And we’re energized to learn the ways that our inclusively designed technologies enable our customers. We invite you to follow along weekly as we share these stories about the transformative change people have experienced with Microsoft technologies. The first story is Andrew and Mitra’s, which shows how, for those who experience learning differences, finding a solution with technology that opens the doors to literacy is an empowering thing. For Andrew, that solution was Microsoft Learning Tools, which was just added to Edge with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update and is coming soon to Word for iPad. Andrew Huber is an eight-year-old who braced himself for the beginning of third grade. Meanwhile, his mother, Mitra, relentlessly searched for a solution to her son’s ongoing struggle to learn how to read. She did not want this year to be like previous ones. “The difficulty reading continued from first grade to second grade, no matter what method and approach the school tried and we tried at home.” Educators struggled to figure out what held Andrew back. According to Mitra, even specialized one-on-one reading tutorials in school yielded little to no improvement, leaving Andrew discouraged.
This morning I read a research paper entitled Leveling the Playing Field with Microsoft Learning Tools written by Katherine McKnight PhD and was published by the Center for Evaluation & Study of Educational Equity RTI International. vThe focus is squarely on asking the question "Does the use of Learning Tools improve literacy outcomes, with both reading and writing for students?"
Firstly, I think it's worth exploring the role that research has in education. It's a pretty hot topic because in my experience, most educators will wholeheartedly agree that basing their pedagogy on a solid research and evidence base is critical, however they also state that sometimes finding timely and up to date research is difficult. There are longitudinal studies which are invaluable and yet with the pace of change across many sectors these days, and education is no different, sometimes the research finding is too slow to get to educators or worse, some of it is quickly out of date, particularly if the technology has improved and moved on during the interim. This particular study tries to address this challenge by stating at the outset:
This week's updates from the Microsoft EDU Team UK! Every Tuesday, we will be sharing the top news coming from Microsoft in Education globally and highlighting any must read blogs and videos to keep you up to date with Microsoft in Education in the UK and globally.
