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Hey folks - it's that time of year again. Reading, Riting and 'Rithmatic :-) I hope everyone has their pencils, erasers, books, lesson plans and a copy of OneNote handy!
I know that many teachers and professors out there are starting to experiment with OneNote for the first time this school year. Have you joined the Innovative Teachers Network yet? This is a great place to find other innovative and passionate teachers from around the world. I know there are many new students who will also be experimenting with the back to school tech gear their parents may have bought. I've also had the chance to speak with some lucky schools who are trying out 1:1 computing this year. I would love to hear from any or all of you on this blog. I had a great comment this morning on my old blog entry title "New OneNote resources for teachers - Come git' em' while they're hot!" In the comment, Nancy claims that "I am currently doing the 'happy dance' in front of my monitor!" I hope that many of you out there get a chance to try out the OneNote education resources that Nancy has discovered and do your own happy dance!
For those of you looking for examples of educators and schools using OneNote in interesting ways, I'll republish the list:
Examples of educators and schools using OneNote
Share with us what new things you are trying out this year with OneNote and technology. Tell us about your own happy dance!
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Hi folks - I'm back after a couple of weeks off with my new daughter Claire. During my time off, I had a chance to do something that I've been meaning to get started on for a while and that is record some OneNote videos. Last Sunday, while Claire's grandparents were busy cooing with Claire and my wife was napping, I snuck into my home office, shut the door and sat down with a cheap-o computer mic and some screen capture software to record some short demo videos.
I've uploaded these videos to a few places, including:
OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers video
Most of these videos cover OneNote 2007 features, but one of them is targeted specifically for the OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers notebook. This video is about 8 minutes long and walks through each section of the notebook briefly and explains its purpose. I encourage people to take a look and watch: VIDEO: OneNote2007 Toolkit for Teachers
I'll be adding more even more education-specific videos in the future, as well as more basic OneNote feature videos. I encourage you to check out any or all of the videos and hopefully they will help you out with some aspects of OneNote that you're curious about.
Here is the link to easily see the list of all 14 videos:
- OneNote 2007 Teacher Toolkit
- OneNote & Outlook integration - tasks, meetings, contacts and email
- OneNote Search
- Using Page Templates in OneNote
- OneNote and Tags
- Print to OneNote
- Save OneNote as web page, PDF or Word document
- OneNote audio recording and linked notes
- OneNote Drawing Tools
- Side Notes in OneNote
- Creating a table of contents in OneNote
- Tools Options settings in OneNote
- Password protect files in OneNote
- Backup with OneNote
A OneNote onesie
And as a final bonus, I wanted to share this photo with you. The OneNote Test team got Claire some great baby gifts, including a teddy bear and many cute baby clothes. But my favorite gift of all was a special custom OneNote "onesie" that the team presented me with last week. For those of you who know me, I like to regularly evangelize OneNote to the uninitiated. This little onesie for Claire was the perfect fit and even had some nice purple lettering, just like the OneNote theme color. Claire insisted on trying it on right away and you can see that she is definitely a chip off the old block in her enthusiasm for OneNote :-)
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Hey folks – I’ve taken a brief break from blogging until at least mid-late August.
My daughter was born on Friday, August 1st. Her name is Claire Freya Tholfsen. She was 7lb 6oz and 19 3/4 in. long at birth. She is our first child and it’s been a week of wonder, amazement and poopy diapers!
I feel like this topic completely fits the OneNote and Education blog since I work on the OneNote team and have been getting a true “education” since August 1st :-)
Talk to you soon
-mike
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This entry will cover sections 3 and 4 of the OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers. This toolkit lives out on the new OneNote site for educators. For those who haven't downloaded the toolkit yet, I will yet again encourage you to download it and share with others.
What’s in the toolkit?
There are 8 sections in the toolkit, and I will be covering sections 3 and 4 today (highlighted in red below)
- Welcome
- Great Education Features
- Lesson Plans
- Collaboration
- Distribution
- Examples
- Common Questions
- OneNote Add-ins
Section #3 - Lesson Plans
The 3rd section of the Toolkit focuses on using OneNote for lesson plans. Many of the features and examples that are covered in this section are existing OneNote 2007 feature but we go into more detail aout how to use them in the context of lesson plans. For example, we go into much greater detail about templates, customer templates and we also cover the OneNote Template Manager powertoy.
We also cover many OneNote basics such as printing existing materials into OneNote, attaching audio/video files, using tags, and creating tables. While people may know about these feature, I always meet people who are delighted to find out that they can "print" any of their existing lesson materials directly into OneNote
There are many examples of different types of lesson plans in section #6 "Examples". One of my favorites set of lesson plans is from Einstein Elementary school's 3rd Grade Math club in the Lake Washington School District. Here's the notebook that the teacher used: 3rd Grade Advanced Math. The teacher saved out each lesson as a PDF and Web Page so any student could go to the Einstein Elementary School web site any grab the materials to print out.
This was a case where only the teacher had OneNote and the students and faculty did not. She used OneNote for effective lesson planning and kept all of her materials together in one place.
Section #4 – Collaboration
The 4th section of the Teacher toolkit covers some basics of collaboration. This includes how to get started with shared notebooks, how to collaborate when developing materials, and other common aspects of OneNote shared notebooks. There is also some materials on Live Sharing sessions. Many people have heard about our collaboration capabilities, but not everyone has tried it out, or has been successful trying to set up a shared notebook themselves.
Here are just a few of the ways I've seen people use shared notebooks in education:
- Student projects
- Faculty certification projects
- Faculty administrative projects
- Teacher/student shared notebooks (e.g. - at Appleby College, they are experimenting with all class materials shared between student and teacher. I'll blog more about this in the future.)
- Collaborative course development
- In-class digital whiteboarding between students and teacher
The "Collaboration" section in the Toolkit covers some other basics of shared notebook interaction, including
- Using Collaboration in Lesson Plans
- Benefits of Sharing Notebooks
- Creating Shared Notebooks
- Inviting People to Shared Notebooks
- Moving Local Notebooks to a Shared Location
- Moving Shared Notebooks to be Stored Locally
- Using Live Sharing Sessions
One of the best ways to learn about shared notebooks is to try it out yourself. There are a few good videos and articles to watch that explain how shared notebooks work.
That’s it for today. I’ll be covering the other sections of the Toolkit in future blog entries.
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Tom Jackson of Microsoft has been working with some Irish schools on a fascinating project using OneNote to develop and distribute curriculum to students. To understand the background of the project, read his initial blog entry from February.
Tom recently posted a new blog entry summarizing what they did. He will be adding more detailed blog entries regularly so be sure to check back. I cited a few parts of his entry below.
Supporting documents:
- For site visitors on Tom's SkyDrive site here
- If you're interested in the Curriculum Mapping piece that was a core part of the Northern Ireland solution, you can see a great video about it here
Quotes:
- From Niall- Dunshaughlin CC Student: “I do believe that given the right training and equipment, - OneNote is the future for learning!"
- Kevin Reilly- Dunshaughlin CC History Teacher:“Excellent software to facilitate organisation in a student’s learning.Inspires inquisitorial spirit e.g. students organised a guest speaker, Kari Rosvall” (See RTE video for her background)
OneNote and Learning Styles - I found the quote from Neil below to be particularly interesting as we have been talking about OneNote and learning styles as well. This seems to support the research that Dr. Ole Lauridsen has done with his "OneNote and Learning Styles - A Perfect Match." paper. If you haven't yet read his pamphlet or watched the video of Dr. Lauridsen, I would highly encourage you to take a browse.
- Neil Armstrong-Wallace HS History Teacher: “More pleasing to note, is the improvement of a couple of pupils who have shown an improvement in their essay mark, compared to earlier work this term. This includes Student A, Student B, Student C, Student D and especially Student E. Student E has really shown the true merits of using OneNote and UMPC in the classroom. He was previously underachieving, yet with the pilot he really showed what he was capable of. I believe him to be a kinesthetic learner; therefore he needs to be focused on completing a task using his hands. Otherwise his attention wanders. During the pilot he was very focused and really put the largest amount of effort into the OneNote module that I have seen all year to date!!. This means that the OneNote has the potential of helping to improve the work and grades of underachieving males and kinesthetic learners. It may have a larger field in helping pupils with SEN with organisation and producing work."
Are other educators experimenting with OneNote and curriculum? Let us know - share you story!
-mike
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Last night I was sitting in the Long Beach, CA airport waiting for my Seattle return flight that was delayed four hours. Great excuse to write a new blog entry! For those of you who have never "experienced" the pleasure of the Long Beach airport, it probably wouldn't be high on my sightseeing lists.
Why was I in Long Beach you ask? Well this weekend Erin Gruwell and the Freedom Writer Teachers had a multi-day conference getting together to prepare to write their next book . For those of you who have never heard of the former teacher, Erin Gruwell and the original Freedom Writers, check out the Freedom Writer Diaries book, the Freedom Writers Movie (2007 w/ Hillary Swank) or Erin Gruwell's excellent biography "Teach with your heart". There is also a foundation established with the same name - Freedom Writers Foundation.
I had the chance to meet the amazing Erin Gruwell a few months ago through a Microsoft Public Sector Education employee named Karla. Erin and her group of Freedom Writer Teachers hail from states across the country and have a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences. These teachers are going to chronicle their teaching experiences with stories, similar to the method used in the original Freedom Writer Diaries book. This book will be released by Double Day publishing next August in 2009. And the tool they are going to use to collaboratively write this new book? You guessed it - OneNote! Karla had been working with Erin and her foundation to coordinate this event, amongst other partnerships with the Freedom Writer Teachers and Microsoft over the next year.
The Freedom Writer Teachers had a four day conference from Friday-Tuesday at the Newport Beach, CA Marriott. HP donated 150 Mini-Note laptops to the group of teachers and Microsoft donated 150 copies of Office 2007 Ultimate, MS Student 2009, and Windows Live tools. The teachers were surprised with a Friday night “Oprah” moment where Erin made the announcement about the free HP Mini-Notes + MS Software to the entire group.
I was invited to the Newport Beach Marriott on Sunday to do a 4 hour workshop on using OneNote. I was also accompanied by Sara, a 7th Grade Forest Teacher and Tony Franklin, the Philadelphia School of the Future SSP. I hopped on a plane on Sunday morning and flew in for the day. The workshop covered everything from the basics of OneNote, to OneNote education scenarios, and all the way to shared notebooks and collaboration. Sara and Tony were my "Teacher's aides" as we went through the exercises with the teachers.
It was an amazing experience and the group of teachers are very tight knit and passionate about the work they do. I also observed a lot of teachers having a blast using OneNote in both personal and collaborative ways. We started out with OneNote basics including organization and the flexible page surface. We also covered embedded files, search, audio/video recording, screen clipping, tagging, and drawing tools as well as other education-focused scenarios. Towards the end of the day, we did a test run of the entire room using a deeply structured shared notebook where each teacher had his/her own section. For the most part it worked well, although we quickly sucked up all the bandwidth in the conference room and things slowed to a crawl by the end of the exercise :-) It was great to see the level of spontaneous creativity that quickly appeared across the entire notebook.
Here's me on the right with a Freedom Writer Teacher.
I felt honored to be able to work with this inspirational group and I look forward to helping them with their journey. I'll be posting updates on this blog as the Freedom Writer Teachers move forward with their book and how OneNote helps the process.
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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:
- Welcome
- Great Education Features
- Lesson Plans
- Collaboration
- Distribution
- Examples
- Common Questions
- 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.
Technorati Profile
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As I mentioned a few posts ago, Microsoft released a bunch of new OneNote resources for teachers at the NECC 2008 conference in San Antonio. Without further ado, I'm going to point everyone to them in this post.
First, off, here is the new OneNote Teacher resources on the Microsoft.com Education Site. This will contain lots of great resources for OneNote and teachers so make sure to bookmark it and check back regularly. I'll be sure to let people know when new things appear here as well.
Second, for those educators or administrators or IT folks who want to understand at a high level, what "OneNote NextGen Learning" is all about, watch this new Flash video about OneNote in the digital classroom.
Over the next week or two I hope to cover more of these in detail in this blog, but today I'll mainly be posting the links.
Introducing the OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers
Click here to download the OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers: If there's only one resource that you start out with, make sure it's this one. The toolkit is a OneNote notebook with templates, how-to articles, teacher-focused OneNote feature explanations, training videos, lesson plan examples, and other resources to help teachers start and then master the use of OneNote in the classroom. My recommendation is to:
- Download and go through it
- 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
OneNote "How-to" training videos for teachers
Next up, we have a new set of OneNote training videos created specifically for teachers. Each video is just a few minutes long and there are a range of topics starting with the basics and moving into screen clippings, Outlook integration and all the way up to shared notebooks and collaboration. There are 29 short videos in all to choose from. Just go to the OneNote Teacher resources page and scroll down towards the bottom and you'll see all of the videos.
Try sample notebooks
Check out these OneNote notebooks to get some ideas of how to use OneNote in school and in your personal life.
- Teacher math workbook: Example of how teachers can store their workbook information for math classes in OneNote.
- Digital portfolio: Sample digital portfolio of a teacher that contains multiple sets of student work, stored and organized within OneNote. Includes homework, quizzes, tests and projects.
- 3rd grade teacher's mathbook: Sample of a teacher’s workbook for a 3rd grade math class.
- Student school workbook: Sample notebook for a university student.
- Shared notebook for a group project: Example notebook to manage shared project information.
- Student personal workbook: Sample personal notebook for a student.
- Student's semester notebook: Example notebook of how a student could organize their work and activities.
- New employee handbook: Example of a new employee handbook for a company. This could easily be tailored for new students or new teachers.
That should be enough to keep everyone busy for a while :-) I'll keep posting over the next week or so and go through the OneNote 2007 Toolkit for Teachers in more detail on a section-by-section basis.
Have fun!
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As I mentioned in my first blog entry, in addition to education I planned to blog about how OneNote is being used as a corporate eLearning, training and on-boarding tool.
Over the past two years, we've been experimenting with this new learning model and now it's starting to really catch on, both inside and outside of Microsoft. The main idea is that instead of thinking about OneNote as only a note-taking tool, think about is as an eLearning distribution tool, or a way to distribute a new employee handbook or a new student handbook.
If you have an office or cubicle you work in, I ask you to turn around and look to see if you have any binders from trainings, classes, conferences, or on-boarding. If you're like many of us, you have binder upon binder sitting dusty on your shelf. Or maybe you just tossed all of them the last time you moved :-) With the OneNote model, you can have a digital version of every training or conference you've ever attended. And it's searchable, portable, offline-able, and there are no printing costs! With OneNote's collaborative features, course designers can collaboratively developed classes or trainings on SharePoint or a UNC file share and then package up the notebook for students when finished. Many groups inside and outside of Microsoft have said that the collaborative courseware development through shared notebook truly changes the way that they work. No more mailing around giant documents for weeks. All courseware designers can be on the same page, they can go offline, and OneNote's flexibility allows easy layout options along with rich media types.
The benefits we've seen from this both at Microsoft and externally are:
- Digital distribution, retention and reusability of materials
- Improved collaboration for both students and course development
- Costs savings and efficiency
- Reduce the environmental footprint
Within Microsoft, there are groups all across the company using OneNote to replace paper materials. We've already been reaping huge costs benefits. One example is listed below where we saved $360,000 for a single large class being converted to OneNote notebooks. If you did this for every class and training at Microsoft (or another company or school), the savings could be quite large and well into the millions of dollars. Within Microsoft, groups are now using OneNote for management training, IT on-boarding, new employee on-boarding, sales readiness, HR conferences, partner conferences, project management classes, new product training, new intern ramp-up, finance playbooks, legal documentation, etc. And think about all that paper, processing and wasted efficiency that can be saved! If your course needs a last minute update with paper and it's already en-route to China, you have a big problem. With OneNote, it's a quick change and the "book/binder" is already updated.
Case studies
- Microsoft Management Excellence case study:
- 30% increased use of learning materials
- $360,000 cost savings for Microsoft
- Environmental footprint reduction
- US Coast Guard case study - IT Training
New public OneNote Resource for everyone
This is a Resource Kit that has been designed for people involved with eLearning, training or on-boarding. This walks you through the steps to create you own rich OneNote notebook. Sections in this notebook include : Basics, Collaboration, Distribution, and Examples.
The kit includes:
- Toolkit - Using OneNote 2007 for Training (make sure to look at this)
- Sample New Employee Notebook
- Sample Training notebook
- OneNote training Video
Here's a sampling of what the toolkit also discusses:
| Instructor Led Training |
See how OneNote 2007 can help you to enhance instructor led training sessions. |
| New Employee On-boarding |
New employees can easily get up to speed by searching in one place (their OneNote 2007 notebook) for the information and resources they need. |
| Manager Development (self paced) |
OneNote 2007 enables managers to have job aids at their fingertips. |
| Sales Readiness |
OneNote 2007 enable sales people to easily take their training content on the road and search it quickly for relevant information. |
| Helpdesk (IT) |
Provide all helpdesk materials in a comprehensive, searchable, updatable package with OneNote 2007. |
| Facilitator Guides |
Easily move existing facilitator guides to OneNote and enable facilitators to add their own information and notes. |
| Participant Guides |
OneNote 2007 can enhance participant guides through providing all materials in one comprehensive, organized package. |
| Other Learning Activities |
Additional examples of OneNote in learning activities. |
Screen shot from the Microsoft Management Excellence notebook
Contoso New Employee On-Boarding:
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Erik meets Bill
For those of you who read my last blog entry, you'll know that my wife and I had Erik Westrum, a innovative teacher from Drammen, Norway over to our house for dinner last week (he liked the lefse, as well as the copper river salmon:-). Erik was one of the award winning teachers from Norway that was flown over by Microsoft last week. He had a chance to show me the cool things he's been doing in his class with video, OneNote, and other ICT applications. Erik is one of those guys who truly loves what he does and it shows. Microsoft hosted these Innovative Teachers from around the world in Redmond and they had a chance to meet with various groups and people. On Monday, I brought Erik by "Building 36" , where I work. I introduced him to some OneNote team members, some MS Word team members, as well as the General Manager of Outlook.
On Tuesday, Microsoft had a little surprise for the teachers. At the close of one of the meetings with the teachers, they brought out Bill Gates! Erik had the chance to meet Bill and get his photo taken with Bill and the other 10 or so teachers. Erik also asked Bill a question during the Q&A period that partially had to do with OneNote :-) Needless to say, I think Erik had a great trip out to Redmond.
Cross-continental OneNote
While Erik was out visiting, he had an idea around a collaborative project in OneNote with teachers from other countries. Erik and his students use OneNote regularly and he thought it would be an interesting project to collaborate with students from other countries. Based on some thoughts he had, I suggested that he talk with Forest Ridge from Bellevue, since they are also very active with OneNote and shared notebooks. I also suggested that the Islay School in Scotland might be interested and Ian Stuart has confirmed that they are. So that makes Norway, the US and Scotland. The teachers will be deciding the what and how in the near future so we'll be sure to keep you posted on how this collaborative project between schools unfolds.
BTW, Congrats to Ian and the Islay School for their recent LTS Ambition award!
NECC
Hi folks - for those of you who are aware of or going to NECC 2008 (National Education Computing Conference) this year, be on the look out for Microsoft and OneNote, in particular. Microsoft has some great materials that have been put together and the OneNote team has a bunch of excellent new resources that are targeted towards educators and faculty. Using these materials, my bet is that any teacher or faculty member, young or old, can quickly become a OneNote education master. I can't share all of the details yet, but I can give you a little taste of good stuff coming out. This will include:
- Teacher Toolkit
- Samples
- Training
- Videos
So make sure to swing by the Microsoft booth and find ht e education materials if you're going to be in San Antonio at NECC later this month. If you aren't going to NECC, rest assured that we'll be posting all of the materials online so any teacher on earth can benefit.
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One thing I want to do on this blog is understand how other teachers, students and schools are using OneNote. We are often surprised by the creativity in which people use our software. I have some examples below of OneNote in education, and we also have many case studies with OneNote in education, but I know there are more. BTW, eLearning, training and on-boarding OneNote stories are welcome too. It's also great for the product team to understand how our customers are using OneNote, as this feedback can help influence decisions in the next version of OneNote, which we are working on now.
How are you using OneNote in education? Share with the community…
Examples of educators and schools using OneNote
Innovative Teachers visiting Microsoft in Redmond this week
This week Microsoft is hosting some of the winners of last years "World Innovative Teachers Forum" from Helsinki, Finland. For those of you who may not be familiar with this forum is, here's the definition:
“Innovative Teachers Forums are part of the Innovative Teachers program, a global community of educators sponsored by Microsoft Partners in Learning. The forums are annual events that recognize and reward innovative teachers who practice the elements of 21st century learning in their own classrooms, and then incorporate these skills into the student learning environment.”
I had the chance to go to the forum last year and co-present "OneNote in the Classroom" with Palie Cantu, an amazing teacher from Forest Ridge. I also had the chance to meet many of the innovative teachers from countries around the world and the great work they are doing. Imagine a United Nations for teachers and you'll get a sense of what the event is like. It was truly impressed by the diversity of innovation that is happening in schools around the world.
In particular, I had the chance to get to know quite a few of the teachers, including Kumaras Pillay from South Africa and Erik Westrum from Norway. Both Kumaras and Erik will be traveling to Redmond this week. I've also learned that OneNote is now being used in schools all the way up in Svalbard archipelago in the town of Longyearbyen,Norway, one of the farthest points on earth where towns exist. The teachers say they are using "OneNote at the top of the world. My wife and I actually are having Erik over to our house for dinner tonight. I'm part Norwegian myself so we'll have some Lefse prepared for him ;-)
The World Innovative Teachers Forum is part of the broader Microsoft Innovative Teachers program. If you've never heard of this program, I strongly encourage you to check it out. You can join the Innovative Teachers Network and collaborate with great teachers from around the world in a community. You can also submit your own work and you too might be able to go to a future World Innovative Teachers Forum. This year it's in Thailand. And of course you can also get the latest and greatest OneNote education materials from the network. We'll be adding a bunch more soon so keep your eyes peeled!
New beta version of PowerPoint 2007 "Producer" available
BTW, separate from OneNote, be sure to check out the beta version of Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. Great for classrooms - both students and teachers.
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Wow - lots of great comments for my first post. I'm glad to see the community growing already. I apologize for the break from my first entry - I was at a wedding during Memorial day weekend and have been trying to get caught up. I'll try and answer a few more comments soon.
There are so many topics to start with, I'm not quite sure where to begin. Thus, I will just jump in and describe how I got into the whole OneNote and Education "scene".
OneNote NextGen Learning Background
About 3 years ago, while I was working on OneNote 2007, I took a class here at Microsoft. I was sitting there watching another student scribble notes on a printed on PPT deck and then furiously transcribe the notes in Notepad during the lunch break. I felt really bad for the guy. At that instant, the rest of Microsoft was not yet aware of the capabilities of OneNote 2007, in terms of what would be possible yet because we had not yet shipped. I started thinking about what would be possible in OneNote 2007 for both adult eLearning and education. A key idea of the "OneNote NextGen Learning" concept is instead of treating OneNote like pure meeting notes tool, treat it more as a tool that could encompass a large part of the learning process, including:
- Deliver classroom content with OneNote
- Easy collaborative content development for teachers
- Ability to collaborate in the classroom
- Reaching different types of learners and styles
- Keeping students and teachers organized with one place for all learning materials
In addition, after thinking about it a bit more, the other obvious benefits would be cost savings for schools and companies, while also lessening the environmental impact. At that point, I started experimenting with a few concepts and working with some internal training and education folks at Microsoft to start trying out these ideas. We tried out many concept and many pilots with positive results. We also discovered that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to create amazing learning materials in OneNote.
I also started trying to find examples of people in education doing cool things with OneNote and pushing it beyond the note-taking capabilities. Some of the first examples included Einstein Elementary School and a Math class a person on my team taught after school. Another great example is the Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart. I'll spend some future blog posts talking in much more detail about these schools and others.
Ever since then, I've been fascinated with the overall "NextGen Learning Concept" and have been working with more and more educators and eLearning folks ever since.
Good, Better, Best
Many people ask - does my entire school need OneNote in order to be effective in education or eLearning? The answer is "No". I like to think of it as a Good/Better/Best model
- Good: Teachers and or/faculty use OneNote to organize their materials, be more productive
- Best: Teachers, students and faculty all have OneNote within a 1:1 computing environment and a great deal of the learning process in encompassed within OneNote, including class materials, collaboration, ePortfolios, etc.
Inspired Teachers Contest
BTW, Microsoft just released a new "Inspired Teachers" contest. If you fill out your story, you have the chance to win a bunch of cool technology prizes that can help out your classroom. I encourage every teacher reading this blog to apply!
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This is the inaugural entry of the new OneNote and education blog! My name is Mike Tholfsen and I am the test manager of the OneNote team and will be the primary author of this blog. Since Dan, John, David, Olya, Michael, Jeff, and Chris (ex-OneNote) all have their own OneNote blogs, I thought I'd blog about one of the areas I'm very passionate about, which is OneNote and education. I am interested in how OneNote can help enhance the learning environment and I believe OneNote will be a primary tool for 21st century education. We also plan to have other guest bloggers from the OneNote team and from other Microsoft teams post education-related entries here. John Guin is still writing the OneNote Testing blog so even though I'm the test manager, this blog will be about OneNote and education.
Because there are so many things happening right now with OneNote and education, we wanted to start this blog to have a dialog with the education community, as well as share ideas, resources, and gather feedback from teachers, students and faculty. We also hope to point to examples of great things that educators and students are doing today with OneNote and education. In addition to K-12 and Higher Education, you can also expect to see topics on eLearning, Training and on-boarding with OneNote. Many companies, including Microsoft, are delivering eLearning solutions using OneNote.
Some of the types of OneNote-related entries I hope to cover in this blog include:
- Teachers
- Students
- Faculty
- Schools
- Collaborative learning
- Collaborative curriculum development
- OneNote education samples
- OneNote tips for education
- Future directions for OneNote and education
- Corporate eLearning, training and on-boarding
- Corporate educators
- A bunch of other fun stuff
Over the last few years, I've had the opportunity to meet with teachers, students and faculty from around the world, and I've seen some amazing things that people have done with OneNote. I look forward to starting a dialog with everyone and you should expect many future blog entries about OneNote and education.
-mike
