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Microsoft365 Windows 11

Defining Measurable eLearning Goals For Teaching Faculty

mie-logo

certified-mieOne of the challenges that many educational institutions face is setting measurable professional development goals for teaching faculty in the area of eLearning. Many schools have opted for using various inquiry models, whereby teachers actively inquire into their own practice and how newly acquired research or knowledge can be integrated into their classroom teaching.

This is well and good, however often there is a core base level competency that is required before teachers can actually attempt the usage of some technologies and this is where using existing training tools can be highly effective for up-skilling teaching faculty. Some schools have attempted to develop their own digital literacy passports for students and staff to increase the minimum knowledge of various technologies used by the school. I see this as an effective, albeit time consuming, approach for schools to undertake.

This is where the Microsoft Innovative Innovative Educator Programs can help.

The blurb on the website describes these programs as:

The Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) programs recognize global educator visionaries who are using technology to pave the way for their peers for better learning and student outcomes. These are a variety of programs to help both educators who are just beginning this journey, as well as programs for educators who are leaders in innovative education.

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A range of courses available from the Microsoft Innovative Educator Program

For Office365 schools this makes tremendous sense as not only does it teach staff how to use the staple tools of O365 such as OneNote, Sway and Skype, it also provides real-world contexts on scenarios this would be useful and effective. The dual nature of this approach means that teachers can be released to be self starters in their own professional development with eLearning tools and management or eLearning leaders can track the progress and development of the staff through their completion of the numerous courses available.

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Microsoft365

Why your school NEEDS to try PowerBI (even if it’s just a little bit)

powerbi-getting-startedThis week I’ve been experimenting with data sets in PowerBI to try and identify a range of schools in New Zealand. In former roles I’ve managed a BI team that has done considerable work with PowerBI but I have not been the primary constructor of dashboards and manipulating data sets. I say this because I want to emphasize how relatively easy it is to quickly build some useful visualizations for interacting.

In my case, I grabbed some publicly available data on NZ schools and downloaded it as a CSV file (Excel would be fine as well) and then used one of the many  data import options into PowerBI Desktop to “Get Data”:

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There is a huge range of options for importing data into PowerBI

The nice part about the Get Data process is that, if the import file is formatted or separated in anyway, then the data is automatically placed into columns during the preview stage of the import:

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School details are split into columns based on the comma separation in the CSV file

What PowerBI can’t do, of course, is easily identify or label the columns based on the data within them. This is important as otherwise when you start creating the visualisations you won’t easily know what the data is, they will simply be labeled “Column 1”, “Column 2” etc. Fortunately, it’s very easy to rename these:

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A logical name for this column would be “School Name”

With the data now in PowerBI, the fun part begins – visualizing it and creating slicers for easy selection and drill down into the data you’re wanting to find. Here’s a dashboard I created with the above data, showing Christchurch secondary schools:

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A quick PowerBI Dashboard utilizing publicly available data

There are a few things to note about the above:

Continue reading “Why your school NEEDS to try PowerBI (even if it’s just a little bit)”

A Quick Welcome

msft_logo_rgb_c-gray-3b156229I’m new to Microsoft.

Check out the “About” page to learn a little more background as to my journey that has got me to this point, however one of the things I came to love in my old job at St Andrew’s College was blogging. I did a fair bit of it around technology and eLearning that you can read about here, and I figured that in my new role with Microsoft I’d try and do the same thing.

My goal will be to blog about various MSFT technologies that I come across and often put an educational spin on them, how they might be used within the classroom or by educators in general. In time, this should become a pretty handy resource for both myself and others to refer to.

So, feel free to follow along either on Twitter ([twitter-follow screen_name=’samuelmcneill’ show_count=’yes’]) or subscribe on the right to receive an update each time I post something here.

Cheers

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Microsoft365

Researcher in Word with Office365

UPDATE 26 June 2017:

I see this is now available in Word on in Office2016 for Mac as well as OneNote Windows 10 Version – see here for the announcement.

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Animation of Researcher in action

I was pretty excited back in July when Microsoft announced the release of Researcher and Editor for Word 2016 as part of the Office365. As demonstrated in the above video, this feature looks to offer a very quick reference search tool directly within Word, allowing users to search, insert and reference new content very quickly indeed.

Whilst it took a while for this to be released into NZ, I have now had a chance to have a quick play with it and the possibilities are immediately obvious. There are step-by-step screenshots and video available from MS Support on how to use it here, so I won’t try and duplicate all of that however I will include a few thoughts below.

researcherThe obvious concern that might present itself to teachers with an accelerated research tool like this is increased plagiarism. However, I think this highlights the fact that the technology remains the tool for students to use, but the need for quality teaching will always remain. Additionally, the increased ease of citing original sources means students should be getting into better habits of referencing where all of their content has come from.

Within Researcher, users can enter a search term and then results are categorized by:

  • Overview – an itemized list of results e.g. the different stages of the career of a sportsman
  • Research – content broken down by each source (Wikipedia features heavily here)
  • Images – relevant images from within the search

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Whilst content added to the Word document is referenced/cited inline, helpfully users can add an auto-generated bibliography at the end of their document to fully reference the original source that has been cited. In my mind, this is gold for students who are wanting to quickly collate a range of sources from the internet that they will then use for an assignment they are writing. The fact that all content is accurately referenced means they can easily go back to read further from the original source, without having that sinking feeling of “which website did I get this information from again?”

Here’s an example of an auto-generated Bibliography (note that it differentiates between types of sources automatically, with the second line referencing an image):

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Auto-generated bibliography using Researcher

Here’s a quick introduction to show you just how easy it is to use Researcher to compile information from a range of sources:

I’d be keen to hear how your students are finding Researcher so feel free to drop comments in the section below.

 UPDATE:

I was sent this tweet from @OfficeInsider in response to my blog post with additional information: