I don’t know many teachers or students that don’t like free resources. Actually I don’t know anyone that doesn’t like FREE anything. If you’re a staff member or student in Grand Erie, you now have access to FIVE FREE LICENSES OF MICROSOFT OFFICE.
This includes the full Microsoft Office Suite of tools:
Outlook
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
OneNote
Skype for Business
Publisher
Access
And more
In order to access your licenses, you simply need to login to your Office 365 account and then follow the steps the video above.
Note: Student email addresses are “username“@granderie.ca where “username” is the student’s GEDSB computer login. The passwordis the same as the student’s GEDSB computer login password.
**When you login to your O365 account for the first couple times, you may not see big red “INSTALL NOW” button. If this is the case, just follow the steps in THIS PDF.**
A special thanks to the Office 365 Ninja for making the above video. For more Tips & Tricks in Office 365, check out 365ninja.com.
Welcome back to the start of another school year! To kick things off this year I’d like to share some exciting changes that have taken place in Office 365 (O365).
In Grand Erie, all staff have had access to Office 365 (where we get our Outlook email) for the past couple years. Starting in September 2015, ALL STUDENTS also have access to Office 365.
If you haven’t logged in to O365 in the past 4 or 5 months, you will see many changes and lots of great new tools.
Note: Student email addresses are “username“@granderie.ca where “username” is the student’s GEDSB computer login. The passwordis the same as the student’s GEDSB computer login password.
There are many great new tools in the O365 suite of tools. The Grand Erie Ed Tech Team will be sharing more on O365 throughout the year. If you’d like to get started now, I highly recommend visiting 365ninja.com and registering your email address to access the Ultimate Guide to Office 365and to receive daily Tips & Tricks(usually in 2 minute videos).
To help get started TODAY, check out the 365 Ninja’s recent post, 5 Things to Learn in Office 365 for Back to School – includes downloading Office 2013, create to-do list in OneNote, master the art of PowerPoint, collaborate in Word, backup files in OneDrive.
Far and away one of the most powerful teaching and learning tools available right now is SMART Notebook. With a SMART Advantage license, this interactive lesson tool can be used with any projector, SMART Board, or Interactive Projector/Whiteboard (like the Epson BrightLink projectors installed in many Grand Erie classrooms). Recently SMART launched SMART Notebook 15 which comes with a handful of new & impressive features.
To see a full list of the features, check out this FEATURES page from smarttech.com.
A few of my favourite features (some new, some old) include:
SMART Response VE – the ability to use SMART Response Clickers OR use SMART Response with ANY web-enabled device. Students can use their BYOD laptops, tablets, or smartphones to answer questions via SMART Notebook/SMART Response and the teacher receives instant feedback on student understanding.
Extreme Collaboration (XC) – using any web-enabled device, students can send text from their device to the teacher’s device (ie. to the projector, SMART Board, or interactive whiteboard). The teacher can then gather the text into a collection as next steps to any lesson.
Note: in the fall, when SMART Notebook 15.1 is released, XC will be moved into the Lesson Activity Builder and called, “Shout it out”. At that time students will be able to send both words and pictures.
Lesson Activity Builder – an easy way to create interactive, fun, game-based lessons in about 5 minutes.
SMART Exchange – thousands of pre-made SMART Notebook lessons built by SMART and by other educators.
Math Functionality – SMART Notebook 15 adds lots of great Math tools that were previously only available with an additional purchase. Examples include shape division, show line lengths/vertices/angles, equation editing, SMART Blocks, and many other tools powered by GeoGebra.
For a nice 6 minute overview of some of the new tools in SMART Notebook 15, check out THIS VIDEO from Danny Nicholson, @dannynic.
For more details, tutorials, and training opportunities, check out SMART’s Notebook Site and/or SMART’s Training Resources and/or open SMART Notebook 15, go to Help, then SMART Notebook Tutorial.
If you’re a Grand Erie teacher, check your email from me on June 26, 2015 for download instructions including our SMART Advantage Activation Product Key. Note that both teachers and students in Grand Erie have take the ability to install SMART Notebook on their personal devices so feel free to share with your students in the fall. Enjoy!
If you’re a teacher and you haven’t yet discovered Microsoft OneNote, you are missing out! OneNote has been around for years but, for some reason, is Microsoft’s best kept secret. Essentially OneNote can be thought of as an electronic binder sorted into Section Groups, Sections (tabs), and Pages. This “binder” can store text, digital ink, images, web links, and files including pictures, PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, audio, video, etc. It literally can replace your entire paper binder of course material (and hold all the internet stuff your paper binder can’t hold). It can do the same thing for your STUDENTS. They can take notes, insert pictures onto the page directly from their digital device, add ink notes, add links to useful resources – powerful, right!?
But that’s not all – if you save your OneNote Notebooks in the cloud (in OneDrive, for example), then you can have your Notebooks (binders) sync to all your various devices – you can access and edit your Notebooks on your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc and all changes will appear in all locations. AND you can SHARE your Notebooks with other people and give them viewership rights OR editing rights (co-teachers, students, parents). Think of the options – an online binder that can be co-constructed by teachers and students alike.
When I first learned about the sharing capabilities of OneNote my mind started racing with all the possibilities. You could have students collaborate within one OneNote Notebook and your whole class could easily contribute in real time in one space – it’s amazing. But then I got thinking it would be great if you could share specific sections of the Notebook with individual students – then students could complete their own work, I (the teacher) could pop in to have a look to provide some feedback and the comments would not be publicly viewable by the whole class. But alas it wasn’t possible unless I wanted to create a new Notebook for each of my students (ie. nearly 100 Notebooks for the average high school teacher).
ENTER the OneNote Class Notebook Creator – in 2015, this SharePoint App provided a OneNote Notebook with:
Collaboration Space – a Section Group where the teacher and all students have editing rights;
Content Library – a Section Group where the teacher has editing rights and students have viewership rights (but can copy content);
Student Notebooks – a Section Group for each student in the class where the teacher has editing rights and each individual student has editing rights, but only in their own Section Group (and they are invisible to other students in the class).
Think of the possibilities! Did I mention that you can “Insert Audio” on any page through your device microphone – consider the implications for providing fast, easy, immediate feedback to your students while reading through their work.
If you’re a teacher in Grand Erie, the OneNote Class Notebook Creator has now been added to our Office 365 apps. Just login to Office 365, select the App Launcher (waffle menu) in the top left corner, then OneNote Class Notebook and follow the wizard. For additional details, check out the OneNote Class Notebook Interactive Guide.
Note: when entering students’ names in the wizard, start with last names and the wizard will automatically show students in Grand Erie with that surname.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with both Jamie Reaburn-Weir AND Dan Ballanytne from the Waterloo Region DSB. I am not the least bit surprised to see they are working together between their schools to create an amazing collaborative learning environment for their students using some simple and effective Ed Tech tools. Definitely worth a read!
For me, the last few weeks have been phenomenal with respect to collaboration. I have been privileged to work with passionate educators who push the boundaries and are not satisfied with the status quo. The collaborations bring out my inner creativity and motivation to push my ideas even further.
Currently I am teaching a pilot course at Cameron that combines ENG 3UI and HSP (Introduction to psychology, sociology, and anthropology). I see the same students for two periods a day and the courses are completely integrated. In many cases I use the HSP content to meet English expectations as many of my students are loving studying psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
In teaching the HSP course, I am collaborating daily with Dan Ballantyne at Bluevale and our partnership has really pushed my thinking. Our planning follows the inquiry model as well as encourages student voice and choice. We are lucky in that…
It’s an exciting time of year for Ontario Educators interested in learning more about the use of technology in education. Bring IT Together 2014 will once again be hosted at the Scotiabank Convention Centre in Niagara Falls.
If you’ve never attended before, Bright IT Together is a joint venture between ECOO (Educational Computing Organization of Ontario) and OASBO-ICT (Ontario Association of School Business Officials). The event features 5 amazing keynotes and over 230 workshops over 3 days.
Keynotes include George Couros, Richard Byrne, Ron Canuel, Artemis Papert, and Brian Silverman. Check out the Keynote Page of the #bit14 site for details on these amazing speakers.
To view details on all the workshops offered, check out the Bring IT Together Lanyard and start planning your journey. Also check out OneNote – The Most Powerful Binder Ever if you’d like to see details on the workshop I’ll be presenting Thursday, November 6th at 2pm.
SMART Notebook, the cornerstone of SMART Technologies, has been one of my favourite Ed Tech tools for many years now. Both teachers and students love using SMART Notebook for creating interactive lessons for all subject areas and all age groups. In Grand Erie, many classrooms are using SMART Notebook with projection systems including standard LCD projectors, SMART Boards and Epson BrightLink Interactive Projectors. Recently, SMART launched Notebook 14 which includes several major feature upgrades and updates from the previous Notebook 11. Some of the key new features include SMART Response VE, Extreme Collaboration (XC), GeoGebra Math Tools, and 3D Tools. All of these features start as a 90 trial and remain in place for all SMART Advantage Subscribers (which is available to all staff and students in Grand Erie).
My personal favourite of all the new features is SMART Response VE. This version of SMART Response allows a teacher to use any student devices (netbooks, tablets, laptops, smart phones) as clickers to poll students and ask a variety of question types that would previously only be possible using expensive class sets of clickers. The teacher simply needs to create the questions in SMART Notebook 14 and send the students to response.smarttech.com, where they can answer the questions. As the students submit their responses, the results are collected by SMART Notebook for the teacher to review in real time. This type of immediate feedback is extremely powerful in helping inform the teacher’s next steps. With this information the teacher knows right away whether the students need a simple clarification, or if they need to pause and rewind, or if they are ready to move on.
To learn more about SMART Notebook 14 and some of the new features available to you and your students, check out the SMART Page on the Grand Erie Ed Tech Wiki. A special thanks to Lynda Kilpatrick for organizing and updating the SMART resources on our Ed Tech Wiki. And don’t forget about the SMART Exchange – a collection of THOUSANDS of SMART Notebook lessons that you can download for free and use right away or modify to suit your students’ needs.
Feel free to comment here if you wish to share a feature of SMART Notebook that you and your students like to use.
1. Power Researching – it’s important to teach our students how to find the information they need. The internet provides a vast wealth of knowledge but students need to learn which questions to ask. The article provides ideas for helping students search like learning more about Google Operators, the words that define HOW Google searches.
2. Meaningful Contributions – learning is impacted in a huge way when students realize their work can mean something to others. Provide your students with options that help them make a meaningful contribution to others. Blogging with your class is a great way to accomplish this by providing an infinite audience for your students’ work throughout the year. Check out my previous post on Blogging … in MATH Class for some ideas.
3. Their Passions – when students are working on something they are passionate about, the world opens up to them. If you can inspire your students to start a project now that they can build on throughout the year, they will accomplish some amazing things. Look for my post later this year on using Minecraft in the Classroom to see the work of students with some serious passion.
4. A Learning Ecology – be a co-learner with your students. Take risks and show them what life long learning looks like. I hope I can help you with that part by sharing some fun, interactive, engaging options for using technology to help support teaching and learning in your classroom this year.
It’s been a while! As I’m sure most educators will agree, May and June feel like one month and the workload is more consistent with an average four month span. In any case, I’m glad to be posting again and look forward to a summer of sharing ideas in Ed Tech with anyone interested in hearing them.
Speaking of blog posts… ever since I learned about the concept of blogging in education, I’ve always considered it to be a powerful learning opportunity. Blogging provides an outlet for student writing that reaches an audience much larger than the one students usually write for (often an audience of one – the teacher). Let’s face it – some students don’t always feel the need to try hard to impress their teacher. When students are blogging publicly, they are potentially writing for ANYONE – their classmates, their friends, their family, complete strangers. For many students, this completely changes the level of effort they are willing to commit to an assignment.
All that said, I’ve struggled with how effective blogging might be in a math class. Then I stumbled upon Windsor, Ontario’s @mathleteblogs on Twitter. @mathleteblogs is the Twitter handle for mathblogs.ca or mathleteblogs.com, a math blogging site for teachers and students to assist in building #maths communication. If you visit their site, you can get a FREE MathBlogs.ca site or you can list your current blog in their directory.
Check out Sophia Mannina’s Marvelous Math Blog for one great example from the MathBlogs.ca Directory. You’ll see the idea is quite simple – students just post some of their math work (done on a tablet or interactive whiteboard, or even a digital photo of their work done on paper) and then write about. That’s it. We always want our students to talk about, and talk through, their math problem solving. This is a great way to have students show their learning, and have other students provide feedback and further comments.
If you’re a math teacher, this is definitely worth consideration for use with your math students when we return to school in the fall. If you have tried this before and can share your experience, or if you have anything else to add, feel free to comment.
On May 15th, 2014 over 200 students from across Grand Erie met in Brantford to share their thoughts on the use of technology in their learning. In the morning students were asked to describe interesting/innovative ways technology was already being used in their classrooms. They were also asked about how they learn and how technology has changed their learning. In the afternoon students designed their own ideal learning environment and described what that would look like/sound like/feel like. Despite our students “breaking” the hotel’s WiFi in the morning, the day was a huge success. And I’d like to add, thanks to Grand Erie ITS Support Staff for rescuing the WiFi in the afternoon.
For the second year in a row, we had the great privilege of working with Will Richardson, who facilitated the event. Will has spent the last 12 years developing an international reputation as a leading thinker and writer about the intersection of online learning networks and education. He is an outspoken advocate for change in schools when it comes to the diverse new learning opportunities that the Web and other existing and emerging technologies offer our students. Throughout the day he shared his thoughts on the current and future state of learning in a world where students are more connected and have more access to information than ever before.
To learn more about what students shared at the Ed Tech Student Forum, check out Jen Faulkner’s website where all learning was documented throughout the day (including a live stream of the entire day) – http://bit.ly/gedsb-edtech.
For more information on Will Richardson or to hear more on his view of education and learning, check out his website, www.willrichardson.com and/or the video below of his TED talk in Australia.