So while my hometown undergoes a rare March Break blizzard, I’m enjoying 13C and sun in beautiful Edinburgh. It’s quite enjoyable to be relaxing in a coffee shop watching the Scottish go about their daily tasks while I get caught up on emails, blogs, tweets and the like. (Don’t worry, I was a tourist yesterday).
Today I start my school visits and so before I head out, I thought I’d best outline my curiosity.
When we laid out the initial structure of the OneNote, there’s no question it was pushing on continuous feedback — we wanted a way of taking advantage of digital ink, audio and video to support student learning both while in the classroom space but especially when the students are not physically present. We are a very active school with extracurriculars (sports, service, international travel) that it was important to be able to engage students in the formative cycle even if they couldn’t be present in class. So, one of my questions will be “How has OneNote affected your feedback to students?“
After the ability to use digital ink, OneNote allowing students to interact & work offline was the second reason we chose OneNote over GoogleDocs. That also played into our first reason – if students aren’t at school, if they’re in transportation, if they’re in locations with little or no wifi, can they still be actively engaged with both my content (as teacher) and their earlier content (as learners). OneNote gives that easily. Once it’s in the Notebook, it’s there to stay and anything new syncs up as soon as you find wifi again, in exactly the right place. And both students and teacher have (respective) control over their space and access to all kinds of digital content (and digital forms of physical content). That prompts another question for me: “How has OneNote affected your teaching & learning content?“
And since good things come in threes, my third question is one that vexes us at Appleby College. “Where do we go from here?” This goes beyond OneNote, of course — although their first response will likely be what they want to be added to OneNote. While it’s all well-and-good to be transfixed by Hololens and to be astounding by the seemingly predictive power of data analytics (my two favourite next-steps in education), classroom teachers recognize that there’s a big gap between the marketing and the reality, in terms of time, money and implementation. So what do those folks on the ground want and feel they need when it comes to technology?
My last question is more personal: “How have you changed as an educator?” My own journey is commingled with OneNote, digital ink, PCMI, and the wise guidance of my colleagues. How are others evolving? What is prompting their ongoing evolution? And what are the pain points?
