Last week my 13 year old daughter came home with a big grin on her face telling me how she was able to use her new Surface Pro and Surface Pen to draw up her science experiment at school. I asked her to show me and you can see the screenshot above with her diagram of the experiment.
I’ve added a couple of markings in red ink on my Surface Laptop with some additional call outs:
- Even though the teacher had created this traditional “worksheet” using Microsoft Word, my daughter was saving this inside of her OneDrive with Word in Office365. This meant it was automatically saving to the cloud with “Auto Save” (top left)
- In the top centre of the screen you can see her Word showing the most recent version of the document – at any stage, she could have shown previous versions – again, powered by OneDrive and cloud saving with Office365
- The top right shows the cloud-powered Dictate in Office365 – this made possible (and smarter) by using Intelligent Services from Microsoft:
Dictate is one of the Office Intelligent Services, bringing the power of the cloud to Office apps to help save you time and produce better results.
- Perhaps the pièce de résistance is the actual Digital Inking she was able to do directly inside of Microsoft Word when she drew up the experiment. She described how some of the classmates on other platforms were attempting to draw this with their mouse and finding it pretty difficult! Of course, there is plenty of research highlighting the value of Digital Inking when it comes to improved critical thinking and test scores – Miss 13yrs was not thinking of this at all (naturally) but simply reveling in the ease of completing her science report digitally!
Personally, I would probably not use Word for something like this (Class Notebooks in OneNote are more my style), but this is a great example from a real high school science classroom showing the versatility of Microsoft Word with Office365, Cloud Services in OneDrive, and Digital Inking on a Surface Pro.
