Last week we launched a bunch of new OneNote education resources on the new OneNote site for educators. This site contains great resources for OneNote and teachers so make sure to bookmark it and check back regularly.  I also want to give a shout-out to the new Office Back to School site, which has a bunch of great materials around Office and education, including Parents and Teachers. 

Today I want to talk more about the OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers.  If you haven’t yet downloaded this toolkit DO IT NOW!!!  I promise you won’t be disappointed.  This toolkit is a OneNote notebook with training, how-to articles, teacher-focused OneNote feature explanations, videos, lesson plan examples, and other resources to help teachers start and then master the use of OneNote in the classroom.

I’ll repeat my recommendation from last week to:

• Download and go through the toolkit
• Share it with other teachers
• Put in on your school's internal network for others to use
• Tell your faculty and principal about it
• Tell your administrators about it

What’s in the toolkit?

There are 8 sections in the toolkit, and I will be covering two of them in greater detail today. Here are the 8:

1. Welcome
2. Great Education Features
3. Lesson Plans
4. Collaboration
5. Distribution
6. Examples
7. Common Questions
8. OneNote Add-ins

Section #1 - Welcome

The first section of this notebook contains a lot of basic materials around what is OneNote, why you might want to use it, and how to get started.  If you’re like most people, you will usually skip introductions, how-to videos, and explanations of what the product is.  I fully understand that- it’s human nature.  But for those of you who actually look through this type of information, you will get a huge head start on the people who skip everything in this section.  But don’t tell those folks (sshhhh) – they will just wonder how you became a OneNote Ninja so quickly and why they are still at 100-level OneNote learning :-)

In this Welcome section, you’ll also find things like OneNote and learning styles information, Training videos, How-to articles, case studies about OneNote and education.

And last but not least, a OneNote Toolkit is never complete without the OneNote song!

Section #2 – Great Education Features

The next section of the Teacher toolkit covers many specific OneNote features.  Not only do we have content from the OneNote Guide, but we’ve also added and enhanced existing content with education-focused materials.  You will find pages such as:

• Managing Teacher Schedules
• Organizing Planning Materials, Class Work, Answer Keys, and Research
• Using OneNote for Day to Day Tasks
• Posting a OneNote "Class" package to SharePoint
• Attaching Files to Your Lessons
• Turning On Rule and Graph Lines
• Creating and Modifying Templates

 That’s it for today.  I’ll be covering the other sections of the Toolkit in future blog entries.