In the summer of 2012, I started a new position at Appleby College. Moving from math teacher to “indeterminate job title”1 meant that for the first time in 20 years, I would not be in the classroom. The goal of the school was to make technology use meaningful at the School by working directly with the folks in IT, while retaining the link to the teaching faculty. And the first result of that project was our OneNote Binder which engendered what would become Microsoft’s OneNote ClassNotebook.
I’ll never forget sketching out on the whiteboard the structure that Jason Llorin, our programmer, would bring to life in my OneNote.
Fast forward to the spring of 2016. Our School, through the generosity of our parent community, has a travel grant that teachers can apply to for support in doing their own independent research. And so I submitted one to look at how our initial work with OneNote has travelled around the world. We want to see how others use it in different countries, different schools, different contexts. How did we get things right? How did others adapt the Notebook? And where are we headed with the technology? What can we learn and what can we share?
Thanks to the assistance of the folks at GlowScot in Edinburgh and the indefatigable Marjolein Hoekstra (@OneNoteC) in the Hague, I’ll be visiting a large number of schools and talking with as many teachers and other users of OneNote as possible. I cannot wait!
(And I will be riding a motorcycle around the south of England on the weekend. Hey, the schools aren’t open on the weekend!)
So stay posted! I start on Monday the 13th and return on the 25th.
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1This really is true. Our CIO has never been able to settle on what I should be called, so he just makes up a name that describes the situation at that point in time. And I’m okay with that — just as our learning space is under continual evolution, so do the expectations and demands of my position evolve. Names define things and by not putting a pin in it, we can remain responsive.
