Kristianstill

I have been working with OneNote, writing a scheme of work for our new OCR National in ICT, Unit 4 should be curious. Planning and constructing a scheme of work in OneNote has been a learning experience, OneNote has also offered some ‘oh, thats neat’ solutions to preparing and scripting a scheme of work, but at other times I have been a little frustrated that it was not WORD with extras. One real educational plus, OneNote has helped me reach students with low reading abilities as I have been able to record audio instructions maybe I will leave a video next time?

Here are a few things you and your students can take advantage of…

First you can write an entire notebook in one ‘location.’ This is highly likely to keep the students more organised and therefore more focused. Even then, the sections of the unit can be sub-divided further.

Like WORD, you can then hyperlink between pages, but however not to locations within a page.

Getting use to the text not defaulting to the top left can take time, but this gives you move versatility on the page.

Tagging is a great addition, I have left plenty of ToDo’s through the Worksheets, ideas and questions but will the students use them?

No centre or align text features but is there a need too when you can type anywhere? This applied to tables as well.

I have yet to use the pens function and I am note sure that I will but it not that different from freehand tools in WORD.

Limited image formatting, no wrapping for example.

Screen clipping evidence I believe will be a widely used tool with 3 months. Simple, quick and the time stamp is very useful.

Embedding sounds and video is a real asset, especially for this unit but what impact will this have on file sizes across college?

Questions to be Answered

Can the students set tasks and will this link to the Outlook accounts within College?

Will the students use the paper template, they certainly make the printouts look impressive.

When laptops become part of the furniture will my students record a lesson for later play back?

Will the students use OneNote over WORD in other areas of the their education?

Will the additional £13 be a barrier to students using the software at home?

For the past three months I have had an on going conversation with Virgin Media over problems I have been experiencing with my PC. Some to do with the Virgins PC Guard and then later, I thought to do with being hyjacked. We have had an engineer visit, a new modem and many conversations with their customer service department. Finally, after a further phones calls / departments and email tennis, I was told that it was an issue my end and that I needed to deal with it. Gee, that was helpful.I coudl ring their IT department where calls would be charged at x rate per minute.

So let me highlight a very different approach. I searched the internet and arrived at www.pchelpforum.com. I created an account, read a few posts and followed their instructions on posting to the PC Security forum. I join and first spoke to ‘Upgrader’ and ‘Jellybean.’ Jellybean was professional and welcoming, he was not dismissive of my lack of computer literacy, but still reinforced the neccessity to fulfil the requires outlined on the site before posting to the forum. He explained that once the information had been posted, their PC security would look at it for me.I asked how this service was supoprted to which he outlined the voluntary, supoprtive nature of the site. I was impressed. We talked about security, about PC Guard, about replacing PC Guard, and one or two issues that might be causing the problem. As I said, welcolming but professional.

Shortly after I have posted, maybe the next day, ‘Pancake,’ left me more instructions to follow and a list of further notes to post. I dutifully completed these, re-posted. Pancake gave me the thumbs up and so ar so good. As recommended, I ran AVG security, Malwarebytes and I am back up and running two days laters. So three months with Virgin vs 3 days with PChelpforum, you chose. So here is my recommendation of thanks. Did I mention there is a whole host of extra support there too?