OneNote and Education : Community

OneNote wishes you a happy Earth Day

Mike_Tholfsen — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:52:00 GMT

April 22nd is Earth Day, and in celebration we've put together some great OneNote resources to help you and your schools reduce your paper usage with OneNote. I've written about this previously, including our web page on how to reduce paper/processing usage with OneNote. Whether it's using the Send to OneNote printer or moving training and on-boarding materials into OneNote notebooks, we think that using OneNote is a great way to both help the environment and save yourself some other "green" (as is $$$ dollars :-) These days, printing is costly to both the environment and school budgets.

Michael Oldenburg, OneNote's top-notch writer, has a great blog post all about OneNote and earth day,

Including the new Green Living Ideas notebook template that is being released today.

The Green Living Ideas notebook is free to download from our Templates site and it works with all versions of OneNote 2007 — including the free trial version. You can download other, free OneNote 2007 templates — including full notebooks plus individual sections and pages — from the OneNote Templates catalog on the Office Online Web site.

For more great Earth Day ideas, check out the Office blog entry for today.

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.

How are you using OneNote in education?

Mike_Tholfsen — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 20:31:00 GMT

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.

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