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As developers of OneNote and the OneNote Class Notebook Creator, we realize that creating exciting products is only the first step towards to making a difference in education. The next steps are to actively train educators on how they can use OneNote in ways that are immediately relevant to their daily school lives and give them the content that serves as a basis for further curriculum generation. The goal behind OneNoteforTeachers.com, a new site developed exclusively for educators is to take a completely new OneNote user and magically turn them into a “OneNote Ninja” in about an hour without any cost to them or their school. Once a teacher masters the OneNote Ninja arts, adding the Bing in the Classroom lesson plans provides a new level of expertise that even Jackie Chan would envy.
OneNoteforTeachers.com—content that clicks and training that travels
OneNoteforTeachers.com delivers FREE interactive trainings with the following unique benefits for teachers (and administrators):
- Focus on basic to advanced scenarios—Our guides start with the “Teacher Basic” tasks that you would do if you just opened OneNote for the first time, and then walks you through some more advanced “Teacher Scenarios” that might involve Office 365 and OneNote class notebooks. Many features are covered in the context of these scenarios, and you can proceed through the guides in any order and as many times you’d like.
- Scenarios based on teacher feedback—In defining what we wanted to include in the trainings, we asked real innovative educators who already use OneNote what they thought other teachers should know about to get started.
- Interactive content at your pace and FREE—Our training takes the form of narrated, interactive click-through guides with customizable timing options. Each guide takes approximately five minutes to complete and has play and pause options. It’s as if you have an instructor sitting right by you telling you where to click and why. Best of all, like OneNote, this training doesn’t cost anything and is optimized for cross-device usage. (Guides are delivered in Silverlight and HTML5.)
- Built-in sharing—Not only are the OneNote trainings all in one place, but they are each individually accessible via a link. That means, if you find a training you think would benefit your colleagues, you can just copy/paste the link or use the sharing buttons in the upper right side of each training and share with your colleagues. There is even the ability to embed trainings in most major websites and blogs, as we have done here!
Since launching the site, we have seen great engagement from the educator community with average site visit times spanning at least the length of one guide and sharing of this resource on LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs! We are heavily investing in making OneNoteforTeachers.com even better, with translation of both the site and guides into additional languages. We are also creating a companion set of interactive OneNote guides for students.
Not a teacher, but want trainings for you? We have school administrator and IT administrator guides on this page as well—including a OneNote Class Notebook Creator installation guide for IT admins.
Whatever your role in supporting education, complete your “Ninja Training” and spread the word about this great resource!
New curriculum in OneNote—Bing in the Classroom lesson plans
While training lays the groundwork, it is always helpful to educators when they discover a tangible resource to use with their students. According to Helen Gooch, Microsoft fellow and master trainer, “this is especially true when the resource contains great lesson plans, which are ready to use, are framed around amazing photographs, draw the viewer in and just make students want to know more!”
Bing in the Classroom (BiC) is a resource that uses visually appealing photographs and short video clips to create integrated lessons, which teach digital literacy while aligned to Common Core standards. With BiC students are fully engaged in the learning experience.
But that is not the best part of this resource. BiC has partnered with OneNote to bring these lessons into the student’s ultimate tool for learning—OneNote!
A BiC lesson plan delivered in OneNote with multimedia like handwriting, Office files, tags and audio recording.
BiC lesson plans started with Word documents and then moved to PowerPoint decks. Each day there are three lessons for grades K-4, 5-8 and 9-12. Each lesson is focused around an essential question to answer. Now, with the power of OneNote to add screen clippings, voice and/or video commentary and the ability to digitally write, draw or annotate in a digital notebook you have a winning combination.
Perhaps you have heard of OneNote or dabbled with it a little but still feel that it is a really new tool for you. The OneNote team has worked hard over the last several months to help educators get up and running quickly with OneNote in their classrooms.
Check out any of the following resources on OneNoteforTeachers.com to help you get started with OneNote or to get some additional assistance:
Remember, OneNote is free (www.onenote.com), and is now available on all platforms and devices, so any teacher can try out OneNote in their classroom and use the BiC lesson plans as a great starting point.
What types of lessons plans are you creating in OneNote? Share in the comments below.
OneNote Class Notebook Creator now supports 29 additional languages
The OneNote Class Notebook Creator extends the power of OneNote for teachers in the classroom with Office 365, enabling real-time feedback and collaboration between teachers and students. Teachers are taken through a step-by-step process to set up their OneNote class notebook.
Last month, we added a number of new features, including new language support—10 languages across 21 markets. We promised more languages were coming very soon and now we have delivered 29 additional languages in the SharePoint Store. This Excel Power Map displays the countries where OneNote Class Notebook Creator now has language support:
Teachers who don’t yet have Office 365, with the OneNote Class Notebook Creator installed, can request their IT administrator to install it with this email template and interactive guide, both of which can be found OneNoteforTeachers.com.
Want to participate in the conversation about OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook Creator on Twitter? Use #OneNoteClass
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