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Posts of interest to classroom teachers
Learning is more powerful and dynamic with tools that are already right in front of you – and it’s up to educators to impress this on students in the classroom. With Microsoft OneNote, educators can create digital notebooks that support academic standards and education outcomes across disciplines and tasks, such as writing, reading, mathematics, science, history, CTE, and elective courses. Students may use OneNote across content areas and grade levels, and use OneNote to compile and organize unstructured information, research, and content. OneNote also supports research, collaboration, information management, communication, note taking, journaling, reflective writing, and academic requirements.
Learning Objectives: Apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate lyrics.
Draw from their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound–letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics) to convey a complete message.
Employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements to appropriately communicate a message and meanign from one language to another
It's not always obvious in the moment, but when we look back we can often point to meaningful conversations that brought us to where we are today. During last year’s Skype-a-Thon, an event in which students across the world rack up virtual miles as they visit other classrooms through Skype, my class was given the opportunity to talk with Jamie Wylly, the General Manager of Public Safety and National Security for Microsoft Worldwide. Hang on: Public safety? National security? I’m an English and History teacher. While I knew that such a discussion could potentially inspire any student, I thought the conversation would be much more meaningful for students studying programming or business. That’s why I offered the opportunity to business teacher Nancy Griffis, who accepted readily. Our programming teacher, Christopher Francis, sat in on the call; he was intrigued by the possibilities Skype offered and, following the call with Mr. Wylly, he decided to bring in other virtual guest speakers for his students.
Our annual Skype-a-Thon is here again, connecting thousands of classrooms to help open hearts and open minds. In our increasingly complex world this could not be more important. The students of today represent our hope for a better tomorrow. They are building our future. This annual event is a celebration of the power of connecting students to each other globally, and an opportunity to teach greater empathy and compassion for our planet and for each other. Through sharing stories and projects, playing games, and collaborating on similar subjects, students’ hearts and minds are opened, allowing them to become more engaged global citizens. Skype-a-Thon is a 48-hour event in which we, as a global community, count the distance all students travel virtually during any Skype calls made from November 28th through November 29th. Last year, thousands of classrooms participated across all seven continents. This year we’re setting a goal for our global community to travel over 10 million virtual miles, and aiming to connect nearly half a million students.
Nicole Ponsford, a Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Expert, has etched a uniquely tech-centric career path for herself. Not only has she spent more than a decade working in schools as an award-winning AST, school leader and examiner, but she’s also the creative director and co-founder of global edtech consultancy TechnoTeachers. Nicole also co-authored TechnoTeaching, a book she wrote with her partner, Dr. Julie M. Wood (completely online and having never met in person). From her beginnings as an English secondary teacher, Nicole found value in teaching digital options and offered the first A-Level Media Studies course in her school. After planning out the course, she became the head of her department and started training her students in the digital arts, ranging from video production to music technology.
Read more at https://educationblog.microsoft.com/2017/11/mie-teacher-to-technology-expert-career/#mfoBTsXW2ZoiKgh3.99
Microsoft today announced that a new Minecraft Hour of Code Tutorial, Hero’s Journey, has been released as part of its ongoing support for Hour of Code. This is the third consecutive year that Microsoft is supporting this global movement, held between 4 to 10 December, to help students learn the basics of coding. Working with Minecraft game designers, computer science educators, and Code.org’s learning designers, the new Minecraft tutorial introduces coding concepts using the popular video game that millions of players around the world are already exploring, teaching, and learning with every day. To date, nearly 70 million people around the world are using Minecraft tutorials to learn about the basics of coding.
With many schools trialing Microsoft Teams in anticipation of the new school year in 2018, I'm having quite a few questions asked around security and also visibility of "teacher-to-teacher" chats, but also "teacher-to-student" and "student-to-student" chats. The great news is that Microsoft Teams is fully compliant with Microsoft's e-Discovery tools to deliver enterprise level compliance and security. The above video provides a good example of how this works (albeit, from a corporate perspective) but this is important to know for schools as well that it is easy to search, collect and store relevant data and communications from within Teams. There is no substitute for continuing to educate both teaching faculty and students about Digital Citizenship, but it's reassuring to know that when a security audit does need to be conducted, Teams is fully compliant with e-Discovery.
An hour of coding is a fun beginner’s experiment for teachers or parents to do with kids—these resources make it easy as well. Chances are high that computer-science literacy will be increasingly relevant for jobs of the future. Some theorists even suggest that the ability to read and write code is a fundamental 21st-century competency. Yet according to an August 2015 Gallup survey, many students get little exposure to these concepts at school; opportunities are even more limited for low-income students. To address these realities, there are a variety of free resources that can help teachers of all grades and subjects give students exposure to computer science, as well as access to opportunities that develop the skills required to approach coding problems.
OneNote has transformed the way in which I operate my classroom, but tables have transformed the way in which I use OneNote. Below are my top reasons why you should incorporate more tables into your OneNotes.
Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Expert Blair Smith says that traveling with his parents as a child opened his eyes to the opportunities available to those with the desire to pursue their dreams. But at the small rural school where he teaches, he found that most students had never even left Central Queensland, let alone the country. Then Skype changed everything. “When I discovered Skype in the Classroom,” Smith explains, “I knew this would change the way I teach. It allowed me to not only expose students to other countries, cultures and religions through Mystery Skypes — breeding empathy and compassion along with increased knowledge in these students — but it also allowed me to stop pretending I was the expert on everything and to bring true experts into my classroom.” One of Smith’s favorite classroom activities is using Skype in the Classroom to bring experts into his classroom to teach, as he’s done with award-winning middle grade fantasy author Chris Tozier.
