My experience with using OneNote Class Notebook

You can watch the full tutorial below to see how to setup OneNote for use with a class. In brief, it sets up a content library that the teacher can add to and the students can, a private space where teachers and students can work together and a collaboration space where the teacher and all students can work.

I have used the Content Library quite heavily in my instructional process. I will project the OneNote Notebook on the screen and use my pen to write directly on the page. Students prefer hand-written items rather than text (unless there is lots of text) as it helps to link into one of the fundamentals of teaching - the relationship between the teacher and the student. I have sometimes had students who have had the OneNote Notebook open in front of them on their laptop so that they can zoom in/out and go back to previous parts of the canvas. I'm very glad that it updates with 15 seconds to their screens.

One problem that I've encountered are the different versions of OneNote. I use OneNote 2016 (i.e. the standard traditional PC application). Many students who click on the link (especially if they are using a mac) end up using the online version of OneNote, which means that it has not synced offline for them. Sometimes students end up with the new Window 10 OneNote App, which seems to be working better than it used to.

I have used the Collaboration tool a few times, but have learnt the importance of clear and directed messages to students as it quickly becomes an opportunity for students to vandalise (a word used by one of my colleagues). When in a demonstration session with some staff, I could not resist the temptation to myself get off track very quickly 'collaborating' with colleagues. What I have learnt form this is the importance of having students play with the tool before they need to use it educationally. I would give students 2 minutes to 'collaborate' on drawing making a face or a house, so that they can just play and do silly things and get that out of their system. It then makes it easier to transition to the serious use of the notebook. This is exactly the same as my brother's technique when taking photos of children - this is the serious photo and then we'll take a silly one afterwards.

I'm yet to sufficiently use the individual student parts of the notebook, but have learnt with others that it is designed to sync individual worksheets (eg a few pages) rather than 100 page booklets as the syncing doesn't really work that well.

What a great tool personally for my own organisation, but also to engage students and get them collaborating well.

Telstra Mobile Protect - lock down you child's telstra mobile or home broadband

Through a handy little web portal, you can quickly and easily lock down websites or hours of access to the internet for mobile devices or the home internet. Quick and easy to setup.

It also includes Social Network Protection  which allows you to receive alerts if there is possible cyber-bullying, offensive language or contact with strangers.

For more information, watch the quick video below (for mobiles) or visit the Telstra https://www.telstra.com.au/broadband/extras/broadbandprotect

Stressed and anxious students not just in our schools, also in our universities @NewsAtNESA @ABCNews24

As reported by ABC News 24 (here), a new report has found that two-thirds of tertiary education students suffer high levels of stress.

Is this a surprise? No!
We have seen students in our Schools with increased stress, anxiety and depression. The responsible body - the NSW Board of Studies, then BOSTES, now NESA - has put into place a system where students who suffer from mental illnesses are not disadvantaged. We give students extra time for examinations, rest breaks, readers and writers if required. Are we setting up students for failure - if not at university, then maybe for life?

Let me be clear, I am not advocating for discrimination against those with disabilities (particularly mental health) but I don't think we've got it quite right that everyone is on a level playing field. Is it fair for an employer to look at a student's Year 12 transcript and ATAR and expect that they are perfectly capable of fulfilling a job position only to find that they need extra time to complete the task? Or finding out that they can only write up a report, if they have a writer for them?

Whilst it is still unknown why anxiety and depression has increased in our youth (yes it is diagnosed more, but it is also more prevalent), the root cause of this remains a mystery. Until we find the underlying cause and problem with our society, we will not fix this problem and we are doing a disservice to the young people in our care and the employers looking for new employees based upon an HSC that doesn't disclose extra provisions.

In response to the video on twitter, @soggyduck has noted that they were stressed in the past. @gibbonwalk expresses concern over the future employment of the stressed uni students.

This is one of the most important issues of our time.

Schools should not be democratic! Teachers are experts! @hornsbyadvocate

The Hornsby Advocate has written an article questioning undemocratic Schools. Now, whilst I agree that student voice is important and can increase engagement the premise of the article is a bit wrong.

Why should our school's be democratic?

I see this as one of the biggest issues in education today. Educators are not respected by society, parents or students for the fact that they are professionals and they are experts. Everyone has been to school, so surely everyone knows how to teach. Right? Wrong! Students do not have the power (and should not!) to choose the teachers at their school. Schools and leadership in schools are responsible for ensuring that quality teaching occurs and teaching and learning that is most effective may not be the same as what young inexperienced children would choose.

Until society recognises that it takes incredible skill to get students to learn, we will not have an education system or international test scores like the top nations.

Government weakens its random inspection of 'at risk' schools by HALF @NewsAtNESA

NESA (The NSW Education Standards Authority) is fulfilling it's promise to conduct at-risk, random inspections. Last year, they promised inspection of 26 schools (18 government, 4 independent and 4 systemic) This year they have announced that they will only target 13 schools, looking at two main areas:

• Child protection, anti-bullying and complaints/grievances
• Quality of teaching and student learning

I commend NESA on the selection of these annual priorities and the move into greater scruitiny over teaching and learning. It is important that for Australia to educate well for the next generation that the students are well taught and progess significantly in their learning. It is not good enough for schools to simply have students in class, we must teach them too!

NESA will randomly select 13 schools instead of 26 in 2017

See the NESA Update here: http://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/about/news/official-notices/official-notices-detail/inspection-of-govt-and-non-govt-schools-selected-randomly-in-2017

Assignment Fatigue - the next big problem for HSC students

It seems like a great idea, reduce student stress by reducing 'high stress, timed exams' and introducing a mandatory assignment for all students in many courses. There will be 'depth study' focus tasks in all Science courses, assignments in the Maths courses and multi-modal presentations in the English Courses. I can't even guess what the requirements will be for other courses as they are published.

So the question comes, when would a school choose to run an assignment for students? Surely not Term 3 (the last term of the HSC year) as this is when schools typically run Trial HSC exams. Most likely not Term 4 (the first term of the HSC year) as students have likely not covered enough content, which leaves students facing a number of assignments in Term 2 and Term 3 of their HSC year. How will students cope with this when they already struggle to manage the balance between work, rest and play? (Yes, the Mars slogan!) More important, how will school's work to resolve this by managing student workload and spreading out tasks? Leave your thoughts in the comments.


Assessment and Reporting Requirements can be found here: http://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/about/news/news-stories/news-stories-detail/stage-6-syllabuses-course-guides-assessment-and-reporting-requirements

The best tool for formative assessment - the humble clipboard!

You've probably got a few of them sitting around your desk and have used them for various activities over time, but have you considered the power of the humble clipboard for assessment?

To be able to adequately assess each student in the class, we need to see what they are doing - observation is still one of the best assessment strategies, because it allows us to delve deeper with each student by asking them questions to see if they truly understand a concept or whether they are parroting back what they have heard. Think of all those questions you ask in class, by the time you walk out of the room and walk to your next class you've forgotten most of the comments students have made a clipboard provides the opportunity to quickly capture those golden moments.

Surely the advent of technology has allowed an easier way to capture this? With all the great things that technology has done, it cannot improve on the speed and ease of using a pen and writing on a piece of paper as you walk around the classroom, that is of course unless you have a Tablet style device and a Pen that mirrors writing on paper anyway!

Of course for all this to work, you are hopefully still not talking 80% of the time (like the research has shown) and have moved to let the students do most of the talking!

What to have on your clipboard?
There is a strong argument to have blank writing paper and that is all, after all, it is easy to set things up. Without too much work though, you can create a single sided A4 sheet with 2 columns - each student's name in the first and space to write in the second. You may like to include their photos at the start of the year. You may be tempted to take this a step further by having criteria that you can tick off and whilst this seems like a great idea, experience tells me that this is not sustainable as you would have to set up a new sheet every lesson. Stick with the simple class list and room to write - set it up once and print a whole heap.

For more info on how you could use clip-boarding, see the video below from TeachingChannel.

Assessment Tools to drive Learning in your class (no ICT required!)

A few days ago, I published an article on ICT tools to assist with assessment for learning. Here are some other techniques worth investigating that don't require ICT. Future posts will detail some of the benefits and cautions with using these techniques.

• Fist to Five Feedback or thumbs up, thumbs sideways, thumbs down - https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/getting-instant-student-feedback
• Exit Tickets - https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/teacher-assessment-strategy
• Twitter Style exit tickets - https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/quick-student-assessment
• Using clipboards for informal assessment - https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/informal-assessment-strategies
• Fist of Five - https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/getting-instant-student-feedback
• Discussion - https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/assess-listening-speaking-skills-ousd
• Maths Journals - https://www.teachingchannel.org/blog/2016/05/24/math-journals-as-formative-assessment/
• Four corners - http://wvde.state.wv.us/teach21/FourCorners.html
• Stoplight - https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/daily-lesson-assessment
• Index cards and 'My Favourite No' - https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/class-warm-up-routine

Assessment Tools to drive Learning in your class

In working out whether the tools below will work for you, consider the following:

1. What type of question would you ask students?
2. When would this technique be appropriate to use?
3. What is the benefit of this technique?
4. Can this relate to the learning intention of the lesson?

Here is a list of free ICT tools that can assist with assessment for learning. Future posts will touch on some of these, their benefits and difficulties.

• Kahoot - https://kahoot.it/
• Formative - https://goformative.com/
• Office Mix - https://mix.office.com/
• Zaption - http://www.zaption.com/
• Edpuzzle - https://edpuzzle.com/
• Geddit - http://letsgeddit.com/
• Lino - http://en.linoit.com/
• Padlet - https://padlet.com/
• ThatQuiz - https://www.thatquiz.org/
• Quizlet - https://quizlet.com/
• A Web Whiteboard - https://awwapp.com/
• Poll Everywhere - https://www.polleverywhere.com/

Why we should give students quizzes every day

There are many benefits to regularly quizzing students. What I mean by this is the 3-5 questions at the start of a lesson. This can be very beneficial to students in their learning as they can get regular feedback on their progress, the depth of their knowledge and if they have any misconceptions.

This regular use of quizzes had been shown to reduce test anxiety (Agarwal, D'Antonio, Roediger III, McDermott, & McDaniel, 2014). It is important to note that this should be a regular routine part of your lesson and not pop quizzes which not only increase stress but are in nature designed to catch students out. The use of these quizzes should be to build confidence in the students own ability because that is a key ingredient to future success.

What to do with the marks?

Even the very nature of this question undermines the very purpose of quizzing regularly. Students need to see assessment as  assisting students in their learning. But  to answer this question upfront, there are several different approaches that you can take. It is worth considering which approach you will take as there are benefits of being consistent.

• Students mark their own work
• The teacher marks the quiz during the lesson
• The teacher marks the quiz after class

The results students get can be used for multiple purposes:

•  They can be shared with parents on a learning management system in real time
• They can be for students information only
• They can contribute to the students final grade (consider not including the worst three results, which could also assist in dealing with absent students)
• They can contribute to a students work habits grade on a report card

How to provide feedback

The benefit of these quizzes is that students can get frequent feedback on their progress. You could consider the following ways of providing feedback:

• Go through the top few errors the next lesson (this will take a large amount of your lesson time)
• Record a video (flipped learning) that students can watch depending on which question they got wrong.
• Have students work in pairs to resolve any difficulties
• Students can complete them in OneNote Class Notebook so that you can start marking immediately and provide individual feedback

What types of questions should you ask?

• Open-ended questions can help to assess student actual knowledge and understanding of the content and also reveal any misconceptions.
• Questions that assess the basic straightforward content as opposed to questions that require students to apply their knowledge  to a new and unfamiliar situation (this helps to build confidence). Applying knowledge to common situations that have been covered in class is fine.
• Multiple choice questions - As these are often time consuming to write consider using an open ended question that had been on a previous quiz and use common misconceptions as the distractor answers. After students attempt the quiz, you could let them work in pairs or groups to compare their answers - students will quickly be able to argue why their answer is correct over the other options.
• Short answer questions - anything that takes the students too long to complete defeats the purpose of this type of quiz.

A few other considerations:

• Design a quiz template that you use for the quizzes, so that students come to know what to expect and be comfortable and relaxed with the process.
• Quizzing is best done as a review activity rather than immediately before or after teaching a piece of content, thus a quiz of the prior days work does not gain the same benefits - (McDaniel, M. A., Agarwal, P. K., Huelser, B. J., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L., III, 2011/2). Whilst there may be some benefit to quizzing the day after you have taught something, for consolidation, it is important that this is not eh only type of quizzing that you do.
• Make sure that whatever you decide to implement is sustainable and manageable within your context.

References:

• Agarwal, P. K., D'Antonio, L., Roediger, H. L., III, McDermott, K. B., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Classroom-based programs of retrieval practice reduce middle school and high school students' test anxiety. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 3(3), 131–139. Retrieved from http://psych.wustl.edu/memory/TELC/Agarwal_DAntonio_Roediger_etal_2014.pdf
• McDaniel, M. A., Agarwal, P. K., Huelser, B. J., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L., III (2011/2). Test-enhanced learning in a middle school science classroom: The effects of quiz frequency and placement. Journal of Educational Psychology. Retrieved from http://psych.wustl.edu/learning/documents/mcdaniel_jep.pdf