Pedagogy library

As I am embarking on a whole school teaching and learning project I thought it would be useful if we had a pedagogy section in the school library.  Having only joined the school this year and not having  time to join the school library myself, the first job was to see if we already had a section: no we don't.  So now, shall we buy some books and chance that they will gather dust and go out of date on our shelves? No we won't.  What I did, three weeks ago, was to email and bulletin all staff with my intentions and to see if anyone wanted to loan books to the library. The response was brilliant; in total six teachers donated around twenty books, the librarian catalogued them and arranged a brilliant display and within a day, two teachers had been, selected books and opened library accounts.  Unless they're stocking up on fuel for the imminent cold weather, we have a blazing success!

Onenote v Evernote v TesPro

Keeping my new T & L blog alive means I must get super-organised; so this post is about my investigation into Microsoft's Onenote, Google's Evernote and TES's TesPro.

Very recently I signed up to TesPro so that I could become more efficient at organising my resources and therefore save loads of time, which in turn could be allocated to the benefit of the students in my classroom.  As I began tinkering with it, I realised that this would require yet another logging on procedure and the only real extra benefit (I could see) over other storage solutions is organising your resources into a calendar.  This got me looking at the calender function on Microsoft Outlook.  I thought, if I already use Microsoft Outlook for email then why not put my timetable into the calendar function and link the resources I need when and where I need them.  You can enter your timetable easily and make lessons recur every two weeks if needed.  This is where I came across Onenote and remembered that I probably don't need resources linked in a calendar; I need the resources and, in fact, all documents for each class together class by class.



  After all, I know my timetable, I have a paper diary and the same resource is frequently used again with the same class so why link the same resource to several lessons.

On the screen clip above, you can see the tabs along the top for my classes and the function menu above those.  The two most useful menus for me have been insert and draw.

Before committing to Onenote, I gave Evernote a blast as I use Google for email and cloud storage so I thought this may be a way to integrate the Google Drive with Evernote.  Not even in the same league.

Onenote is like having all the resources you need spread over your work desk but you can tidy and spread out a whole set of other resources in one click.  This is also what one of my colleagues noted when I presented Onenote to the science department today.  Another colleague said that they would be interested in using it to replace Active Studio, as you can draw anywhere on the page by using the 'draw' menu, very handy!  No one in the department had used Onenote before and there was lots of evidence to suggest they where impressed and may give it a go.  Since writing this post, several have.

I did have a few problems trying to access from home etc but overall, I think it is a game changer.  Seriously.