Guest blog by Helen Gooch, Microsoft Innovative Educator

The OneNote Class Notebook Creator, the incredible app for education, is maximizing classroom potential and has educators I know exploding with excitement. The app provides true classroom collaboration, e-resource, student personalized workspace and notebooks that educators have been asking for since first discovering OneNote. If you haven't heard much about this app before, be sure read the OneNote Class Notebook blog post which details the new features and enhancements requested by educators! There is a step-by-step click through guide for using the updated OneNote Class Notebook Creator. Also, be sure you check out, OneNoteForTeachers.com which provides several excellent step-by-step guides for everything you need to know to be up and running in OneNote and OneNote Class Notebook Creator in no time.

Like learning any new tool, there are a couple of things to remember and keep in mind as you adopt this new classroom best practice. When working with the OneNote Class Notebook Creator, you should be in your OneDrive for Business in your Office 365 account. Click the settings icon, gear next to your picture/icon in the top right corner. Go to Site Contents and then select OneNote Class Notebook Creator (purple) app. 

This screen will then launch:

Select #1 to create a brand new OneNote notebook for a class. It will prompt you to name the notebook and set up the tabs/sections in both the teacher content space and the student workspace. If you want to edit the name of Content or Collaboration section group, be sure to leave the underscore as the first character of the name. This places those section groups at the beginning of your OneNote.

Select #2 any time you want to add students. If you are just starting a class notebook, you add students here. If you need to add students to an existing Class Notebook, you add students here. Any time you are adding students, you add them here. If you need to delete a student, go into your Class Notebook and right click or control click that student's section group (tab) and select delete. *Note: This is a permanent action. Once you delete a student, you cannot undo or back arrow the delete. You can always add a student back to a class notebook, but their work must be recreated.

Select #3 to add another teacher to your OneNote class notebook. This might be a co-teacher, a substitute teacher, or any teacher/admin you want to able to add/edit content and see the work of the students. This is a feature you have asked for and the team delivered!

Select #4 to view any of your existing notebooks. You can also access any of your existing Class Notebooks when you go to your Site Contents and choose EduOneNoteAppDocuments. Part of the app update also provides additional ways to access and find these notebooks.

Find them through Class Notebooks:

Find them through Notebook Links:

Find your notebooks in Shared with me:

Tip! The Content Library is for the teacher to provide content, e-resources, documents, pictures, or whatever is relevant to the course. As the teacher, you can copy and move any content into your student's notebook sections (but you will have to do it one student as a time) OR your students may copy and move from your Content Library into their section group. Students may not edit or change your content in the Content Library. So if you want to provide handouts, quizzes, worksheets and more to your students, this is the place. At the end of the course, semester, or year, your students may want to keep their OneNote notebook with all the content you have provided as well as the collaboration work and their own section group of tabs. They can by simply going to File, then Export and save their OneNote as an OneNote package (.onepkg). 

They can now move it to a flash drive or store it on their own OneDrive so they will always have access to their course/e-Portfolio of work.

Reminder to check out these additional resources for teachers:

• Step-by-step click through guide for using the updated OneNote Class Notebook Creator
• OneNoteForTeachers.com 

Recently, we brought together some of the brightest educators and school leaders in the Americas at the Microsoft Global Forum in Miami, Florida from November 5-7. The 2014-2015 Class of Education Innovators were announced at the Forum. While there, educators explored new technology that has the potential to revolutionize both teaching and learning and to discuss the next wave of innovation that promises to reshape education from top to bottom including how to use technology to enhance creativity and humanity. Sir Ken Robinson, a keynote speaker at the Forum, explained, "The real virtue is not in the tools we create, it is in how we use the tools to create, how creative we become with the tools. The challenge with technology is not a technological one, it's a spiritual one."

Significant Change

Enthralling the educators he spoke to, Sir Ken Robinson discussed the phenomenal change that has occurred since releasing landmark work on education, Out of Our Minds, ten years ago. Apologetically, he said "If you bought the original version of the book," he said, "I'm sorry. It's dreadful." "The reason I had to rewrite the book is so much has happened in the last ten years. Things were in prospect, but not actualized ten years ago," says Sir Robinson. "Ten years ago, the Internet was still pretty much a limited occupation for very many people. There were no smartphones, no tablets, certainly no Surface Pros. There was no social media, no Facebook, no Twitter."

Sir Robinson emphasized that the evolution of technology has and will always continue to transform the planet and education. However, "what's often less clear is the consequences of technology-- they are almost always entirely unpredictable."

Transformation in Technology Allows Creativity to Flourish

The significant transformation in technology over the past ten years bring about both challenge and opportunity for educators and students. Perhaps the most important thing that technology has the potential to unleash is creativity.

Creativity is what allowed the human species to flourish and bring the population up to the nearly seven billion it's at today, but consequently also created the massive problem of sustaining the consumption that comes with such a vast population, Sir Robinson explained. These challenges, he says, were created by the "human ingenuity" that come from creativity, but at the same time, it's that same creativity that may be the only thing that can solve these vast challenges we face.

"I define creativity not as some piece of connectivity," says Robinson "but as a pervasive human trait. It's the capacity to apply your imagination, the process of having original ideas that have value. Part of what we try to do in creative thinking, is to disrupt the habitual patterns of thought that we take for granted. The hardest part of creativity is to challenge what we think of as obvious."

"There is an endless and indomitable supply of creativity if we create the right environment for it," he says. "If the culture is right, things will start to grow again."

Using the Right Technology to Unleash Imagination and Expression

The key to nurturing this creative thinking and personalized learning in schools, explains Robinson, is not only taking advantage of all the technological advancements made in the ten years, but by using the right type of technology, and in the right way, to create the type of learning environment that unleashes imagination and expression beyond what was even thought possible before.

"Technology is pervasive," says Sir Robinson. "Human progress, from the earliest times, has been a kind of conversation between our hands, our minds, and the tools we've created. Technology, put simply, is the design and use of tools, the first of which was probably some kind of flint axe, but as soon as we've created a tool, whether it's a flint axe or Surface Pro, we are doing two things - the first is, a tool extends our physical capacities. Secondly, the availability of a tool expands our minds- it makes us think of things that we couldn't think of before."

It is this kind of 21st century digital technology in classrooms that can spark new ideas and unleash the creativity that defines us. Today, digital inking in Windows empowers us to illustrate ideas when ideas flourish. And, powerful collaboration tools like Office 365 and OneDrive make it easier for students to capture creative and critical thinking, then actively exchange ideas and share with others. Educators are more easily about to created flipped classrooms with online lessons created in Office Mix and then engage students in lessons, tools like the OneNote Class Notebook Creator , and successfully teach students of all abilities using Lync for distance learning. The innovative educators that came together at the Forum are reshaping education, using the right technology tools to help students unleash and express their creativity.

Rethinking the Fundamental Principles of Education and the Role of Technology

As Sir Robinson explained at the Forum, "The real virtue is not in the tools we create, it is in how we use the tools to create, how creative we become with the tools. The challenge with technology is not a technological one, it's a spiritual one."

Sir Ken Robinson closed his speech with these words -- "If we start to rethink some of the fundamental principles of education, its relationship with technology, there's a better chance that we will create the world that we and our children will want to live in."

Watch the video recap from the Global Forums in Miami:

Read more about Microsoft in Education and our commitment to education.

Guest post by Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Worldwide Education

It's Computer Science Education Week, and through Microsoft YouthSpark, we're celebrating as a lead supporter of the Hour of Code… one of the largest learning events giving more than 100 million students around the world their first taste of computer science and software engineering.

Why - when teachers and administrators are already tasked with never-ending to-dos - is introducing computer science for one hour a big deal? By starting early, students will learn what's possible when it comes to creating - not just using - technology and they'll also learn foundational skills that are needed for success in any 21st-century career path.

While one hour may not seem like a lot of time, it can be challenging for busy teachers and students to fit that hour into any given day. Together with Code.org we're excited to share that students and educators can take advantage of engaging, easy-to-use materials and tutorials translated into more than 30 different languages to help them get their start today.

"Out of the millions of people who will try the Hour of Code, we know there will be people who just 'get it,'" says Doug Bergman, a computer science teacher at Porter-Gaud School in Charleston, South Carolina. "As they move through the tutorials, [students] will find that it makes sense to them, and they are even able to do some of the challenges without help." Berman adds, "[Students will be] able to take the ideas in their head and bring them into something tangible on the screen in front of them. And those people may reconsider computer science as an area they want to explore. Maybe they take a class, read a book, or just make a realization that computer science is not what they thought and their conversations around that topic are now different."

There are many Hour of Code tutorials available for schools and one was developed with TouchDevelop, created by Microsoft Research. TouchDevelop is a free coding tool designed for students - and teachers - with no prior computer science knowledge to learn the basics and gain hands-on experience. In the Microsoft tutorial for Hour of Code, students will be able to fix a fun and simple game that challenges players to guide a robot through a maze of obstacles. I encourage you to check out all of the tutorials including Microsoft's tools, details on how we're supporting computer science education this week and all year… and how others around Microsoft are inspiring students to get their start this week.

Just one hour. That's all it takes to get a student excited about computer science.

The Hour of Code is just the beginning! In 2015, LeX and IT Academy teams will be rolling out additional resources for introducing computer science to students around the world. IT Academy member schools will be able to take advantage of new curriculum, hands-on exercises and online courses available.  And the IT Academy will be unveiling a new introductory programming course with Python. Stay tuned!

By Anthony Salcito

When Microsoft introduced OneNote more than a decade ago, we knew we were onto something that could transform the work of teaching and learning. Educators immediately understood its potential - and both teachers and students have reaped the benefits ever since. Fast-forward to 2014, and the new OneNote Class Notebook Creator takes OneNote to the next level, letting teachers set up a personal workspace for every student, a content library for handouts, and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities -- all within one powerful notebook. To top it off….when the notebook is created all students and the teacher automatically get an email with the link to the notebook ensuring everyone is seamlessly working together.

But believe it or not, this is just the beginning.

Based on feedback from educators around the globe, I'm pleased to announce that we've enhanced OneNote Class Notebook Creator to make it even more powerful. We've added:

• Localization in ten languages in 21 markets, including English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese -- with many more on the way.

• Full notebook access for co-teachers, student teachers or substitutes when you add them to your notebook.

• Easy-to-find links in Office 365 and within the OneNote Class Notebook Creator app.

• Faster performance (up to 66 percent less time to create a notebook) and other UI improvements.

Be sure to check out the details here - including a brand-new interactive guide with step-by-step instructions that make creating a class notebook even easier. Also, check out OneNoteForTeachers.com for free interactive trainings on using OneNote for teaching and learning.

With the Office 365 ProPlus benefit now available at eligible institutions worldwide, staff and students alike can access OneNote on all major devices and browsers. This means that exchanging student work and teacher feedback in one place - anywhere and anytime - has never been easier.

The best news? These OneNote Class Notebook Creator enhancements will help more educators spend less time on paperwork. Instead, they'll be focusing on the business of learning, and preparing students for their critical next steps. And that's a win-win for everyone.

“The OneNote Class Notebook Creator can literally ‘blow your mind’ as an educator with its potential in schools.” — Kevin Sait, head of IT strategy for Wymondham High Academy Trust in Norfolk England, kevinsait.wordpress.com . Since the launch ...read more