Unfortunately, it is a copyrighted image and I wouldn’t feel right about including it in my presentations. However, I’m sure we could easily find an image with similar imagery that is licensed under Creative Commons. Thanks for the suggestion!

How about this image for Open Minded?

http://www.poweredtemplates.com/word-templates/consulting/04302/0/index.html

or:

http://myaimlesslife.com/2009/07/28/keyhole-to-heaven/

The plugin doesn’t work… AT ALL and saving it as a webpage creates one REALLY REALLY LOOOOONG page.

I’ve made entire sections of my curriculum into PDFs and then had them download them… the thing is that I am evolving the class as I go… to suit their needs… and to fit their capabilities. I also want to be able to add to these sections as I progress as a teacher.

The primary issue is that I’m teaching Commercial Art and Graphic Design…. on Macs… the school has Office 2007 on the school PC’s (I was on 2003 on my PC up until I raised a stink about it this week.) But as I said, my kids are on Macs… running MS office… whatever the available version is… but onenote isn’t crossplatform I don’t think, in fact I couldn’t find onenote at all for the mac….. so far I think I have two choices.

Manually copy out all the content… a page at a time… creating tabs in a web platform… OR…. figure a way past the firewall… so my kids can access skydrive.

If microsoft wasn’t so darned proprietary about their stuff this would be MUCH easier… I should have compiled my little notebook in Adobe InDesign… at least there I could print it… I could save it as HTML… and I could make PDFs… I’d even have better font and layout control.

Anyways… if you come up with something by all means shout out.

Thanks.

Adam

Does your school have any sort of intranet? Can you place the notebook in an intranet folder and give students read-only access to that one specific folder so they can grab a copy of the notebook, either section by section or by creating a single file package (File -> Save as -> Notebook -> Single File Package) that will unpack the entire notebook onto the students’ computers?

There is also a plug-in to export your notebook as an interactive website but I’ve never used it.

@Tami Brass That sounds like a lot of notebooks open for a teacher, especially if they are teaching 5 section of 20 or more kids! Do you have any screenshots of what a teacher’s OneNote looks like with all those shared notebooks?

We create skeleton notebooks for the first day, consisting of the usual first day handouts (class expectations, assessment criteria, etc) as well as sections for each of the units that we will be covering for the year. If the teacher is super organized, it might even contain the first few classes worth of material. As teachers need to give resources to their students, they place it on our SharePoint portal, create a link on the class wiki and direct students to the required link. Students then open the file (Word files, .pdf files, or OneNote files) and insert them into their notebook! There is definitely a learning curve for students and new teachers, but we’re getting there!

We share notebooks with our students via our network. In our most common configuration, teachers create a notebook for each unit. Students create a notebook on the server in their portfolio folder, shared with teachers. The teacher puts a copy of the unit notebook in an area accessible to students who then paste a copy of it into the shared notebook, making it a notebook section. Took a bit to work out, but ROCKS!

I agree that MLA (or any other style of referencing) is more of an impediment than anything else. As one of my colleagues said, kids in grade 6 spend more time making their works cited page than they do actually writing the work! I know that MLA has its place in academic writing – particularly in that prehistoric ‘paper’ format – but we seem to be basing our expectations of 12 year olds on the wants and needs of extended essays and universities. If our goal is to help shape our students into informed prosumers of information then we should be making referencing more accessible and not less.

I also think that including inline MLA citations in written work, which are great for ensuring that reader is keenly aware of bias, does not exclude the use of a link to that resource or to the works cited where a link should be included. My biggest problem is the impediment to writing caused by forcing kids to keep track of all this stuff. To what extent do young writers of all ages need to adhere to these rules to meet the three goals you mentioned?

I’m in total agreement about the need for some refreshers. When I pitched this week to the middle school teachers, I was adamant that we would need to continue to visit topics such as cyberbullying and cybersafety both in advisory lessons and in their classrooms as teachers design learning experiences that require it.