Strategy help for a newbie

[Jeremy's Dad]

Just started using OneNote today and would like some "strategic" suggestions
as it cleary is a very powerful tool. In short, I am preparing a series of
classes for a course I will be teaching in January and I want to use OneNote
to assist in my preparation.

Assuming for simplicity that each class, I will be teaching the students
about a specific person in history. My immediate thoughts are as follows:

* One notebook for each class (person's name)
* One section for each topic in a given class
time period, current events of the time, contemporaries etc.
* One page for each different research book/material with each topic

That structure works for me in terms of gathering the information I want and
keeping it organized as to where the source is.

I am unsure how to start to "put it together" in preparation for my
lectures. How best to gather all the current events from each source for
example? Am I to understand that OneNote can help in some magical way? (grin)

Hoping that question makes sense, I look forward to your thoughts.

Gary

 

[Ben M. Schorr - MVP (OneNote)]

I'm not sure there really is a magical formula. Your proposed
organization sounds good to me.

Gathering info into OneNote is pretty easy; but it won't really help you
FIND that information. I typically get on the net, find articles and
resources that are interesting/useful, then drag/drop that content into
OneNote. Once it's in OneNote you can organize, sort, annotate...

--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP
Roland Schorr & Tower
http://www.rolandschorr.com
http://www.officeforlawyers.com
Author - The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007:
http://tinyurl.com/5m3f5q

 

[John Guin [msft]]

You can also check out a blog centered on OneNote in the educational world at
http://blogs.msdn.com/onenote_and_education

 

[Steve Thackery]

Once it's in OneNote you can organize, sort, annotate...

....and you can insert plenty of hyperlinks between the various bits and
pieces, which will help pull it together.

SteveT

 

[Jeremy''s Dad]

Steve,

Can you give me some examples of how the hyperlinks "pull it together"?

I'm not looking for the lazy way our here but have just been looking at
using tags and thought maybe custom tags would assist me. If I understand
them correctly, I can request a listing of all items by tag. This would
certainly be helpful in assembling my research for a lecture.

Thanks

G

 

[Steve Thackery]

Can you give me some examples of how the hyperlinks "pull it together"?

I don't really have a clear picture of what you require. But, in my case, I
often have a snippet of information that might be relevant in more than one
of my notebook pages. Or I want to make it easy to jump between related
topics. That's when I use hyperlinks. Think of your notebook pages as web
pages - on a web page you will often see hyperlinks to related topics on
other web pages. You can do the same between pages in your OneNote
notebooks.

I dunno - suppose you're interested in writing software, and you've got a
page on Visual Basic, and another page for Fortran. On your Visual Basic
page you might have a snippet about how to create an array of integers.
This might be a great place to insert a hyperlink to the equivalent
operation on the Fortran page. And maybe another hyperlink to an online
Visual Basic reference.

With respect to your lectures, I don't have enough of a feel for how you
work or what you want to achieve. But you will have realised that the
notebook/section/page arrangement is essentially hierarchical, which is a
great way to organise information. Hyperlinks complement that arrangement
by letting you "punch through" the hierarchy where it's appropriate. It's
another way of moving around your "web" of information.

Simple as that. Only you will know whether that is useful for you.

Sorry I can't really be more specific than that.

SteveT

 

[Jeremy''s Dad]

Steve,

Your examples work very well for me. In fact, I think they are going to be
high priority for "playing" about. My current process for gathering
materials from my research has been time consuming and work intensive.

As I am working on a given topic, I can have dozens specific sources that I
need to keep track of. This results in me often recreating the same work
multiple times because I write the information in one document for each
source and then cut & paste from all of them to create a main document to use
for my lecture. Later, I then repeat the steps to prepre PowerPoint slides.
Finally, one more time as I create handouts etc for students. I'm hoping to
find a simplified way to "assemble" the pieces of information I need without
the need for duplication.

Thanks for your suggestion, I'd like to play with it a while along with the
tags..

Up here in Canada, this is our Thanksgiving weekend. As I prepare to dig
into all the stuffing, please accept my best wishes and I trust you will take
Care

Gary