Note taking any where

I was talking to one of my colleagues recently who, with some enthusiasm has embraced the idea of eLearning to such an extent that all of his students now arrive at class not with a notebook and pen, but a wireless enabled laptop! Now not withstanding the problems that you may or may not experience with wireless technologies, one of the issues that soon make itself apparent is the activity of note taking in an electronic environment. Let’s face it, the combination of mono-purpose scripting tools and double sided optical paper have a bit going for them still, i.e. you can change to any writing to drawing mode in an instant, annotate at any time and of course providing you resist the temptation to rip out, materials can been retrieved from their storage medium with ease. If you are using say Word or equivalent package, of course you have access to drawing tools of sorts, though they tend to be a bit clunky, alternatively you can always task switch to drawing package and import the images, fiddly though. So what is this all leading up to, go back to pen and paper, no. The other day I discovered OneNote, which comes with Microsoft Office 2007. If you look at the Microsoft site for this then OneNote is described as an ‘easy-to-use note-taking and information-management program where you can capture ideas and information in electronic form. Insert files or Web content in full-color, searchable format or as icons that you can click to access'. Add to this the fact that you can use freeform drawing tools and OneNote starts to look as if it could be a really useful package. If you would like a preview then take a look at this video, and please feel free to drop a reply to this blog with your own experiences.