teaching and learning

One application I love is OneNote; a new(ish) addition to the Microsoft Office suite and one that gets as much use from me as Word. I’ve tried things like EverNote, but for keeping notes, jottings, ideas, images etc. it’s pretty hard to beat and the 2007 version is another improvement.

One thing I like is the ability to TAG things inside a page, and for those tags to be customisable. At the New Imagery Conference last week I took my computer into all my sessions (I’m always suprised when I’m at teacher professional development or conferences just how few notebook computers are there) and used OneNote to record my note and impressions.

OneNote is hierarchical in structure (hey, it’s Microsoft) and I’d set it up as below with a NOTEBOOK called PD and Conferences and a SECTION in that notebook called New Imagery and then sessions as separate pages in that section as seen here.

Tagging things with my notes make it easy to find those things later. You can easily customise the tags but mine below are only sligtly adapted from the standard set. I like to remember good words and good quotes so I set up a tag for them. As I’m taking the notes I tag them so that I can easily find them later.

It works well, and you can find all tags within a page, section, notebook or your entire OneNote files. The window below shows some of the tags from the conference and you click on the tag to access the original note. Works well for meeting notes too.

Oddly enough it hasn’t helped me yet to get back to those sessions or find the time to blog about them individually. Luckily Hey Jude has already written up some sessions, including the really interesting Michael Furdyk presentation Digital Kids and Michael Fullan’s session on School Leadership.

Well worth a look, and I’ll get something up too eventually!