OneNote and Education : Collaboration

OneNote will be part of the Office 2010 Professional Plus package!

Mike_Tholfsen — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:22:00 GMT

I'm excited to tell everyone that OneNote 2010 and SharePoint Workspace 2010 (formerly Groove) will be added to the Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 release. We are not announcing any information about consumer SKU changes just now.

OneNote 2010 provides a comprehensive set of tools to accommodate how people and teams work today. With shared notebooks, organizations can gain even more from SharePoint investments - OneNote becomes the easiest place for teams, including teachers, students and faculty, to quickly swap information and stay on track. With this release, it offers new and improved ways to capture and share collective knowledge. OneNote 2010 facilitates collaborative editing in wiki-like ‘living documents.

So overall, we're really excited to see OneNote included in this upcoming Office 2010 SKU.

Get a Free Copy of OneNote 2007 - Tuesday, 1/20/09 Webinar - "Get connected and collaborate in your Classroom with OneNote"

Mike_Tholfsen — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:50:00 GMT

Hi folks - after an extended paternity/holiday break with my daughter, I'm back at work and back on the blog. I hope you all had a great holiday season.

Next Tuesday, (January 20th, 2009 from 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm PST) Microsoft Solution Specialist Tony Franklin will be presenting a Teacher Tech Tuesday webinar on OneNote 2007 in the classroom. I've had the opportunity to work with Tony a few different times, including the Philadelphia School of the Future and the Freedom Writer Teacher event. Tony works extensively with the Philadelphia School of the Future and has been a proponent of OneNote and education for many years. I highly encourage you to sign up for this free webinar and engage with Tony for his presentation.

Microsoft will also be giving a free a copy of OneNote 2007 for any teacher that views the webinar and completes the survey at the end! If you missed the last one, now's you're chance to get a copy of OneNote. More details on how you get your free copy are listed below.

So round up as many teachers as you can and watch this webinar on Tuesday.

Click here to sign up for the 60 minute webinar.

Official Abstract

Teacher Tech Tuesdays - Get connected and collaborate in your Classroom with Office OneNote

Live Jan 20 1:00PM-2:30PM Pacific Time

Get tips on how OneNote can help you organize class materials and class work, create collaborative work environments, and share workspaces. In this webinar we will cover:

- Getting Started with OneNote
- How to get organized with OneNote
- Organizing class materials & class work
- Creating collaborative work environments

*FOR THOSE WHO ATTEND THE LIVE SESSION WE WILL SEND YOU A FREE COPY OF ONENOTE

*View the LIVE webinar and complete the survey at the end to receive a FREE copy of Microsoft Office OneNote!

*Offer good only to legal residents of the 50 United States or the District of Columbia actively employed as K-20 teachers/faculty members at accredited educational institutions in the US. Limit one (1) copy of Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 per teacher / faculty member. All proof of academic status must be received by February 15th, 2009. Offer expires at 11:59 PST on February 15th, 2009, while supplies last, and is not redeemable for cash. Offer is non-transferable except as otherwise provided herein. Taxes, if any, are the sole responsibility of the recipient. Any Award(s) returned as non-deliverable will not be re-sent. Please allow 6 - 8 weeks for shipment of your Award(s).

Before we can send you a copy of Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 you will need to provide proof of your academic status. No order will be shipped until a valid academic ID is received.. We will place your order on "hold" until we receive your valid academic ID. Upon receipt of your academic ID, we will ship out your order. You can send your academic proof one of the following ways:

1. Fax a signed copy of the letter to 425-708-6649, ATTN: TeacherTech
2. Mail a signed copy of the letter to: Microsoft, One Microsoft Way, Attn: TeacherTech Lincoln Square/20257, Redmond, WA 98052.
3. Email a signed copy/PDF of the letter to Teachtec@microsoft.com

Acceptable Forms of Academic Proof: (Any one of the following)

- Dated Faculty ID Card

- Dated, current class schedule

- Letter from school on school letterhead

- Recent faculty/staff payment stub (please black out salary information)

The Freedom Writer Teachers, OneNote and the Long Beach Airport

Mike_Tholfsen — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:02:00 GMT

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.

OneNote for eLearning, training and on-boarding, plus a new OneNote resource kit!

Mike_Tholfsen — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:55:00 GMT

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

Download: Using Office OneNote 2007 for Training Resource Kit

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:

Erik meets Bill, and a cross-continental OneNote Project

Mike_Tholfsen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:12:00 GMT

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.

Welcome to the new OneNote and Education blog!

Mike_Tholfsen — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:57:00 GMT

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