Obvious to you. Amazing to others

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This video contains an outtake from the book ‘Anything you want‘ by Derek Sivers.

I really recognize this. Although I love to share knowledge and insights, I’m not very good at doing this just by myself. If someone asks me something, I’m more than willing to answer, write a small guide or refer to other interesting resources. 

By blogging regularly, I want to share more of my thoughts and insights, and hopefully also create new ideas by restructuring and rethinking these thoughts and insights. Until now, I often feel like I’m just repeating what others have already written. Although I regularly find out that others have never heard of anything I am ‘saying’.
I guess it’s really like this line from the video:

We are clearly a bad judge of our own creations. We should just put it out and let the world decide.

Demo: Teams in the Classroom at Microsoft Inspire 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcbQ2UK69Tc

I think it’s stunning what Microsoft is currently accomplishing with Teams, especially its applications for education.  

In this video, you see Dr. Kellerman using teams to create a community of more than 500 students by using not only Microsoft apps like Teams and OneNote, but also all kinds of external apps that run from tabs in Teams (e.g. Moodle and powerful engineering software). All with Microsoft Teams and AI, using the Microsoft Azure platform.

He uses AI via Question bot on the Azure platform, which can even find answers to student’s questions in the transcripts of videos, and he used PowerBI for a personal analysis of their data for each of the 500 students, so each of them had tailor made questions to practice. Very, very inspiring examples of what is possible with this platform.

Using Microsoft Teams and AI, Dr. David Kellermann, lecturer in the school of engineering at the University of New South Wales, has more than enhanced the experience of his students — he’s transformed the classroom and learning experience, while creating a community of learners.

Microsoft (in the YouTube-video description)

I feel lucky that the school that I work for also started implementing Teams. For now, we only use it for one-on-one and group communication, sharing files and notes and task management for group projects, just like many non-educational organizations and companies have started doing. But we are looking closely at all the new possibilities that could be used to facilitate modern education that is really engaging for students and inspires them to participate and create and share their own knowlegde. 

Personal Automation Challenge

http://www.asianefficiency.com/productivity/day-1-of-personal-automation-challenge/

This week, I joined the ‘Personal automation challenge’ by Asian Efficiency. For this challenge, they shared a very interesting video from their new upcoming course, with some very useful tips. The first part of the video contains tips for Mac users, and from 12:48 there are tips for Windows users.

Video opens on the Asian Efficiency website in a new tab or window

After watching this video, I re-ordered my Finder’s navigation bar and added some new folders to it, I added the Split PDF quick task and I created a smart folder to find all ePub-files that I have on my Mac somewhere.

Today I also created a shortcut that opens Gmail in my browser. I already had a bookmark for it in my bookmarks bar, but then I always first had to open a new tab in my browser, and then click on the bookmark. I often forgot to create that new tab, so it loaded in the tab I was working in, which I actually didn’t want to leave at all. Each time this happened, I first had to go back to the page that I was on, then open a new tab and then click on the Gmail-bookmark. ☹️😤😫

By starting the Gmail-bookmark via a shortcut, I noticed that it automatically opens on a new tab in my Chrome browser. So that doesn’t make the process just one step shorter, but at least two steps (and the feeling of frustration about forgetting to open a new tab).

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