My thoughts on Microsoft Teacher Academy... #freepd

Less than a week ago, Microsoft announced a few online learning options for teachers, which they have termed "Microsoft Teacher Academy." I have been learning Microsoft OneNote using the online course called Teacher Academy--The Ultimate Collaboration Tool: An Introduction to OneNote.  It's taken many hours to work through it all, so I've been working about an hour or so each day to try to complete it. It's a bit dry, but he does build in some little assessments along the way and asks questions to make sure you pick up the important points. I recommend frequent breaks. :)

Before you read all this, know this. If your school uses Office 365, then OneNote is awesome and you will find the last few modules of this to be super helpful. I didn't know that before I did all this work.

I've had OneNote on just about every device and computer I've had in the past few years, but I'll be honest that I haven't used it. I am a big Evernote user, and they do seem a bit similar. But, I typically just use Evernote to save things when I am on my phone so I can review them later on my computer.

It starts off a bit slow. I did learn some cool things regarding digital notebooks (which can be saved and shared on OneDrive) and the search features. And, I found it cool that is you paste information from the web that it includes the source URL. That's handy.  But, if you are interested, I'd suggest you go to unit 5, Delivering Curriculum with OneNote. That's a pretty neat unit and I learned some ideas for perhaps creating unit plans and such for my classes. I loved embedding audio or having students record audio clips and saving them to the OneNote document and sharing the document with the teacher for assessment purposes.

The neatest thing I learned (Module 6) was about the OneNote Class Notebook (app) feature.  I loved how you can set up the student sections automatically and that each student gets their own private space in addition to a collaborative space. There is also a content library for teachers to store "read-only" information as well.

I teach an Advanced Computer Applications (dual credit MS Office) class this year. I thought I might try this until...

wait for it....

Apparently you have to have Office 365 for your school to use the cool class notebook! I tried many different ways to make it work (thinking it would maybe be something in the cloud that I wouldn't have to download and downloading from different places) but I couldn't figure it out. How sad. We are still running Office 2013 Pro at the school. Some of their ideas for staff notebooks was cool, too, and a bit nicer than just sharing resources on the "shared drive" we can only access at school.

I'll still probably use regular OneNote in the class (just not the Class Notebook option) but won't be able to micro-manage their notebooks unless I have them share part of it with me. That sure would have been handy.  But, I might do a small pilot in the one section of Adv CA I have in the fall (I have 3 sections in the Spring).

My brain is so full of stuff from this summer! Between the book studies and all the online stuff, I just don't know where to start! Anyone else feeling that way?

Have a great Saturday!