Going paper-less
So, this month, I am going to attempt to teach Cash and treasury Management paper free using a combination of OneNote, PowerPoint, SWAY, Forms and Word documents.
I will be supporting this with a Microsoft Teams team set up for my class to provide opportunities for two way communication and further ad hoc experiments.
Why am I doing this?
Very simply to make life easier for me and to reduce costs for my college.
Since I started teaching accounting, I've been very conscious of the amount of paper we generate for class materials, handouts etc. This paper has a cost both to my employer but also to the environment.
Over the last year, I've been using OneNote as a one-stop shop resource to teach various elements of my course and decided that now would be a good time to go completely paper-free for one whole unit.
I've been watching the excitement other teachers around the world have been showing with their experiments with OneNote and felt that this would be the ideal tool for me to move forward with my cunning plan. For me, Moodle was the tool of choice until 2 years ago when I was introduced to OneNote. Since then, I've been playing with OneNote and now believe that, whilst Moodle is certainly a really useful VLE, OneNote gives me a much simpler, swisher solution.
At first, I set up lessons based on PowerPoint (and/or SWAY) presentations to allow learners to see what's coming and be prepared - i.e. flip the classroom a little.I intend to use a flipped approach for some elements as the learners have already covered some material with another unit so, for this unit, they will just be refreshing their knowledge and skills. I hope that this will save about 3 hours teaching time in this first iteration - not bad when the whole unit has a total teaching time of 42 hours.
I will supplement my presentations with relevant, appropriate videos highlighting key concepts or ideas and provide Word documents with questions to be answered - online of course.
Knowledge checks will take place during lessons (and afterwards) using quizzes set up using Forms with more in-depth calculative questions and discursive tasks being submitted via each learner's OneNote Student Pages. I intend to do all marking online - using a combination of digital inking, audio feedback and more extensive written feedback. All feedback will, of course, be online.
Monitoring of progress though this unit will take place using a spreadsheet in the Teacher Only section.
For many out there, this may not be a very ambitious project but, for me, it's a huge leap forward and one I've been trying to make for a couple of years. Only now do I feel that I have the necessary skills (and available tools) to pull this off and will, hopefully, save the college some £23 per learner(based on a notional 5p per page of printing - but not including PowerPoint slide handouts).
I've been keen to try to get tablet computers for my learners - given the savings on this one unit, I can see that we could save a total of £138 per learner for one qualification. If we extended this to the three levels we currently teach, we could save about £400 per learner. Take these savings along with the flexibility of all the digital tools I will be using and I am sure that you can see that this could lead to massive savings on an institutional level if every member of staff took what they currently do on paper and moved to OneNote (obviously, where appropriate).
I will endeavour to update this blog as the unit of study progresses with commentary on how things work |(or don't) and how learners respond to this shift in tactics.
Where, you may ask, have I gained all these new skills from? Quite simply, a mixture of being brave enough to experiment and some excellent resources (free I may add) available on the Microsoft Educators Community (see here: https://education.microsoft.com/).I've quickly learned how easy most of it is - your don't need to be a technical guru, a digital wizard - what you do need is a little bit of courage to try something new, learn from mistakes (and I've made many) and evolve ideas even further. Sometimes, I've had to start from scratch but, in general, I've been able to move forward without too much difficulty. One of the big things I learned early on is that very often, I don;t need to do anything new - I just need to do what I do - but differently. One of the biggest factors people quote for note trying something new is the availability of time - I haven't actually spent much extra time preparing this one unit and, of course, now have the ability to adapt and reuse for the future.
I've been lucky enough to be part of our college's Digital Leader programme and I've been amazed and impressed by some of the things people are doing where I work. It all makes my simple steps quite boring. However, I believe that big things, whilst impressive can sometimes be a little intimidating - another reason to start small. yes, I've taken a whole unit and digitised it - but, realistically, I could have just taken old PowerPoint slides and uploaded them into a SWAY to make things a little flashier and more "21st Century".
Once the unit is up and running, I will post examples and, of course, welcome suggestions for improvements.
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