Make use of Microsoft OneNote for education

We all know that if our notes and school work are organized, we can think more clearly and save time and frustration. So imagine how challenging it can often be for students with dyslexia to take good notes, which are essential to academic achievement. Many students with dyslexia report that they often don’t take notes because it’s just too hard.

One advantage that all note-takers have in the digital age is the opportunity to use tools, such as Microsoft OneNote, to make taking and organizing notes a lot easier. For students with dyslexia, OneNote has many features that can help students take notes faster and in different ways, stay organized, and meet literacy challenges, such as spelling and grammar. 

Here are five ways that OneNote can help students with dyslexia take better notes:  

1. Take notes faster

To take good notes, you have to record information fast. Commonly recommended ways to speed up note-taking include using shorthand or abbreviations and symbols instead of fully writing out words. These are difficult skills to master, and for students with dyslexia and dysgraphia (difficulty in handwriting), they can be especially challenging. OneNote not only lets students type notes so they’re sure to be legible later, but also it offers many additional ways to speed up students’ note-taking. This means that they can spend more time paying attention and less time worrying about losing the information they didn’t have time to record correctly or clearly.

Here are a few of the ways OneNote makes “digital shorthand” available to students:

• OneNote offers several ways to automate repetitive tasks, filling in information for students so that they don’t have to take the time to do it. For example, the AutoComplete feature enables them to enter long strings of text by typing just a few characters. When the AutoCorrect Options button or the Paste Options button appears on the page, students can simply select the option they want instead of having to type it themselves. AutoComplete and AutoCorrect are turned on by default in OneNote.
• Keyboard shortcuts can speed the process of entering information even more. Start by selecting a few shortcuts that the student uses most often, and then add more. Here’s how to use keyboard shortcuts:
• Microsoft OneNote 2010
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007

Students can find and access what they need a lot faster by simplifying and customizing the ribbon, toolbars, and menus. In OneNote, students can group ribbon and toolbar buttons and menu commands together in a way that makes note-taking faster for them. They can also create a toolbar that contains only the buttons and menus they use most often. The Quick Access toolbar in OneNote 2010 can easily be customized in this way. Students can even create a custom toolbar button or menu command. Minimizing the text and images on the screen can be especially helpful for students with dyslexia.

Here’s how to group related buttons and menus on a ribbon or toolbar:

• OneNote 2010
• Office OneNote 2007

Here’s how to create a custom toolbar:

• OneNote 2010
• Office OneNote 2007

2. Record audio and video notes

Like patting your head while rubbing your stomach, understanding information while you are taking notes is not easy. Students can make an audio or video recording of a presentation from within OneNote while they’re typing notes. OneNote adds an icon in the note margin that students can click when they’d like to play back what was being said or shown at the time they took the note. Listening to the audio notes later, while reviewing their typed notes, can help increase comprehension. In addition, students can paste audio recordings of related information into OneNote (for example, an audio recording of an assigned book). Just like the text in OneNote, all audio recordings can be searched for specific spoken words or phrases.

 Here’s how to record audio or video notes:

• OneNote 2010: Click the Insert tab, and then click Record Audio or Record Video.
• Office OneNote 2007

3. Use visual cues to help you organize and remember information

Using visual cues in a notebook can help students to sort through their notes faster and to better understand different kinds of information. For example, students with dyslexia can find and process information better by marking notes as definitions and by highlighting information. OneNote lets students highlight text and assign a variety of other colorful and distinctive tags to notes, such as To Do, Important, Question, Idea, Definition. They can search the notebook for a particular kind of tag, too.

This is a great help, because it makes it easy to create a list based on specific kinds of notes, definitions, or key ideas that students can use to study.

Here’s how to work with note tags:

• Office 2010: Select the note you want to tag. Click the Home tab, click the Tags list, and then select the tag you want to apply.
• OneNote 2007

Structuring the page to take good notes has also been shown to help students. For example, left-justified, ruled pages with thicker lines can help students with dyslexia locate information faster and comprehend it better. Lists and tables can help them and other students to better focus and comprehend. Students can also customize the color of text and numbers to make their notes more readable. They can select Full Page View, with toolbars minimized, so they can read their notes better. If they need more space on a page to see all related information at the same time, all they have to do is click and drag the page to add space horizontally or vertically. OneNote gives students all these options and more so they can create a personalized notebook that supports their way of learning.

Students can access most of these options by clicking the View tab on the OneNote 2010 ribbon.

Students can use the OneNote 2010 ribbon to structure pages for easier comprehension.

 

4. Use outlines and templates

All students, and particularly those with dyslexia, can benefit from structured note-taking, such as the use of outlines and templates.

Outlining is one of the most helpful features of OneNote. Each note you take in OneNote, whether it’s a paragraph or just a list item, is automatically entered as an element of an outline. Each outline appears in a container, surrounded by a thin line with a handle along the top edge. OneNote lets students create vertical or horizontal outlines, use bullets or numbers, expand and collapse outlines, move them around the page, and send them directly to Word.

Here’s how to work with outlines:

• OneNote 2007

Note-taking templates can help students to take notes and to develop their note-taking skills. This kind of graphic organizing can take many forms—strategic note-taking (which uses general written or visual cues to prompt the note-taker), guided note-taking (which uses written or visual cues specific to the presentation), column-style note-taking (in which the main ideas go in the left column and sub-points in the right column), or webbing (which uses a non-linear approach to mapping information).

Teachers can set up a general note-taking template and distribute it to students to use on a daily basis, or they can create a template for students to use to take notes during a specific presentation. Parents and students can explore what works best for the student overall and then create a customized note-taking template in OneNote, based on the way the student learns best.

OneNote comes with built-in note-organizing templates and access to templates at www.office.com. You can easily customize these them to create your own note-taking structure.

Here’s how to work with templates:

• OneNote 2010
• Office OneNote 2007

5. Use the spell checker, dictionaries, and thesaurus

OneNote has other great tools that support reading and writing comprehension, such as spell checker, dictionaries, and a thesaurus. In addition, OneNote 2010 includes Research options. Students simply type a word or phrase in the Search box, and OneNote brings related web sources, in addition to dictionaries and thesauruses, right into their notebooks. Having the information they’re researching displayed right next to their notes can help students stay on track.

Here’s how to use the spell checker and research features:

• OneNote 2010: Open the notebook you want to check, click the Review tab, and then click the tool you want to use. In the lower section of the pane, click Research options to specify where you want OneNote to search.
• OneNote 2007: Open the notebook you want to check. From the Tools menu, selectSpelling, and then click Spelling.

Related links

• Learning and OneNote: Using Microsoft OneNote to increase comprehension
• Four ways to improve your note-taking with OneNote
• Get started with OneNote 2010
• Basic tasks in OneNote 2010

More ideas

Some students with learning disabilities may qualify for a disability accommodation for note-taking that allows them to use note-taking services (often provided by peer volunteers). The following are additional ideas and resources to help students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia:

• Office OneNote WebApp enables teachers, parents, and students to access and edit entire OneNote notebooks from a browser—even on a computer that doesn’t have OneNote installed. It’s a fast way to check whether students’ note-taking skills are improving.
• Windows Live SkyDrive enables you to sync notebooks to the cloud so that they are available anywhere from any computer
• Interactive Classroom connects your Microsoft PowerPoint lessons with students’ OneNote notebooks, enabling you—during a lesson—to insert yes/no, true/false, and multiple choice questions. Students answer, in real time, with a simple click. You can adjust the lesson to the results, adding ink or text annotations that they see in their notebooks. Help engage every student, and equip them all with study notes that match your content.

Office 365 administration roles and usage

In office 365 there are few admin roles can be assigned to selected users in the tenant to make the administration easier. If one person is handling all the tasks for example creating users, password reset, purchasing licences if needed, creating service request will be a headache for him.

At the same time we can  not give full permission to the selected users to do few tasks. in this case Microsoft office 365 has given us few administration roles which are different from each roles and the task are limited and different from each role.

Below the the administration roles available in office 365 and can be assigned for any selected user to manage certain ares than everything is managed by one person.

• Global Admin
• This administrator will have the full permission of all the admin roles in the office 365 tenant. he is also called as super admin. he can create, delete, edit users, reset password, assign administrative roles to other users, create service request, purchase licences, manage distribution groups and domain management.
• than the above mentioned task there are hundred of task that can be done by the global admin.
• Billing admin
• this is a limited permission account. 
• this admin can only do billing and purchasing tasks.
• he is responsible of doing payment purchasing license for the user when requested by the global admin or the user management admin.
• Password admin
• in a very large organisation this kind of admins are popular. mostly in every department or every country (if its a multinational organisation) there may be at least one password admin.
• this admins main role is to reset the password of the users on a case when the user forgot his o her password. he can only view the users and reset the password on their request.
• to reduce the word load of the global admin he appoint few password admins so they can reset the passwords of the users than coming to the global admin or the user management admin.
• Service admin
• On office 365 the service request is one of thee great service offed by Microsoft.
• on a technical or any other situation on office 365 and if the administrators cant solve it we can escalate it to Microsoft office 365 team. the Expert team. 
• a service admin can open a service request and follow the service request with Microsoft rather than its also done by the global admin. 
• User management admin
• creating users managing users can be done by a user management administrator.
• This kind of role is assigned in a large organisation which has a large number of departments across the world. 
• this admin can create, delete, manage users in office 365.
• but this user cannot assign admin roles to others users. it is done only by the global admin.

Microsoft Intros 200GB SkyDrive Plan Ahead of Windows 8.1, Surface 2

The OS and tablet company unveils a new SkyDrive storage option in a bid to get Windows users to park more of their data on the cloud.

Microsoft launched a new SkyDrive plan weeks ahead of the impending releases of Windows 8.1 and Surface 2 tablets.

The cloud storage service now provides 200GB of additional capacity for $100 per year. The move comes as the software giant prepares to bring out the sweeping Windows 8.1 update and new Surface 2 tablets, both of with feature deep SkyDrive integration.

"SkyDrive is the default location for saving your files," in Windows 8.1, Omar Shahine, group program manager of SkyDrive.com, noted in a Sept. 23 blog post. "We didn’t want you to worry about filling up your hard drive, so we invented smart files to allow you to access your entire SkyDrive from your device, without actually having to store everything locally."

For some perspective, Shahine offered that "200GB is enough space to take a photo, every hour, from the moment someone is born, to the day they graduate from college.

Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 buyers get 200GB of storage for two years, free of cost, along with a free year of access to Skype WiFi and free Skype calling to landlines in more than 60 countries, also for a year. Both tablets are available for preorder.

This summer, the company unveiled new enhancements that will enable Windows 8.1 and SkyDrive to work together more seamlessly and provide users with a more responsive experience that minimizes the delay that is sometimes associated with fetching files on cloud storage services. On July 22, Mona Akmal group program manager of SkyDrive apps, announced in an Inside SkyDrive blog post, that Microsoft is adding placeholder file technology to the OS.

"Placeholder files look and feel like normal folders and files" and can be edited, saved and deleted just like local files. "This means that the placeholder file is significantly smaller in size [than] the file in SkyDrive, but when you need to use it, we'll download the full file for you," she stated.

So far, the technology seems to help users stretch the on-board storage of their Windows 8.1 devices, said Akmal. "Early data in the weeks since Windows 8.1 Preview was released suggests that this architecture is delivering on the goals we set out with, and SkyDrive files are taking up less than 5 percent of the local disk space that they would have taken in the old system."

The new 200GB capacity follows SkyDrive Pro upgrades for Office 365 users. Default SkyDrive Pro account holders are now entitled to 25GB of document and file storage, compared with 7GB. The update brings added benefits for businesses that have adopted the cloud-enabled productivity software suite.

"With Office 365, you get 25GB of SkyDrive Pro storage + 25GB of  email storage + 5GB for each site mailbox you create + your total available tenant storage, which for every Office 365 business customer starts at 10GB + (500MB x # of user(s))," Mark Kashman and Tejas Mehta, Microsoft SharePoint marketing senior product managers, wrote in an Aug. 27 company blog post.

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Windows 8 & Windows RT tutorial

Windows 8 and Windows RT come with new ways of getting around. Many PCs now have touch capabilities, but you can also use the mouse and keyboard that you're familiar with. Getting to know some basic actions can go a long way toward helping you get around your PC quickly and efficiently.

For more click here

Office 365 for education

Free for schools, Microsoft’s Office 365 offers faculty and students exciting new ways to collaborate. Easy to administer and even easier to use, Microsoft’s Office 365 is backed by the robust security and guaranteed reliability you expect from a world class service provider. With email, instant messaging, calendar, video conferencing, document storage and more, Office 365 offers powerful cloud-computing technology, anytime, anywhere.

The Catholic International Education Office (OIEC) has entered into an education alliance with Microsoft Corp. to provide Office 365 for its community of Catholic schools across the world as part of a new Social Network for Catholic Education. Read

Office 365 for Education gives students and teachers the tools they need to be successful

With Office 365 teachers can conduct online classes, record them, and share with anyone who is online or offline. Teachers can also keep your students informed and on track with Class and Group sites with SharePoint Online 2012 where you can share documents and collaborate on projects from any location. You can view, edit, and share Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files online with your students through SharePoint and Office Web Apps. This allows teachers to create and distribute student assignments and projects.

No need to learn new software
Office 365 works with the Microsoft Office tools teachers and students already count on. The rich set of privacy, security, and protection capabilities built into Office 365 keeps user and project information safe. Microsoft also provides 24 by 7 global support for subscribers in your local language.

Ideas for use

• Develop lesson plans and share them with other teachers
• Keep up with student work with their online digital notebook
• Record lessons and post them on a class site
• Foster technology skills in students to enable success in the workplace
• Use Lync and allow group members to collaborate online
• Work together in real time in Excel or OneNote anywhere
• Give tutoring sessions online using Lync
• Store documents on SharePoint and access them through a mobile device
• Easy to use document creation tools to create quality reports, spreadsheets, and presentations

Supporting absent students with PowerPoint and OneNote

Access to high quality, regular education is essential for young people and is one of UNICEF’s articles on Children’s Rights. Sometimes students cannot attend school. These students will fall behind if they cannot take part in learning activities for a long period. It is always possible to send text-based material, but with technology it is possible that absent students can stay more engaged in learning activities, including hearing the voice of the teacher.

To download the full guide click here

Using OneNote to reflect on your practice

The illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. (Alvin Tofler) Teachers who constantly question the way they teach and regularly reflect on their teaching performance will gain a good insight into what works best in their classroom.

This tutorial is designed for educators who already have a basic knowledge of Microsoft OneNote, but have not used it yet for reflection. With Microsoft OneNote teachers will be able to use all the benefits of technology in order to reflect upon their teaching and to build upon what they have learned in order to enhance their teaching performance. 

To download the full guide click here

Microsoft One Note

OneNote is a digital notebook that lets you store all your valuable class or project knowledge in one place. Whether your information is text, pictures, or in a paper folder, it can be digitized, organized, and easily accessed from OneNote. You are productive because everything you need on a subject is at your fingertips. You will be able to build learning connections with other teachers and your students for the ultimate school experience.

What is TO, CC, BCC in a email?

In e-mail terminology, Cc stands for "carbon copy" and Bcc stands for "Blind carbon copy". The difference between Cc and Bcc is that carbon copy (CC) recipients are visible to all other recipients whereas those who are BCCed are not visible to anyone.

To specify the recipients, an e-mail message can contain addresses in any of the 3 following fields:

• To: field recipients are the audience of the message
• or People required to take action
• CC: field recipients are others whom the author wishes to publicly inform of the message (carbon copy)
• or Kept informed of the content, but no actions required from them
• BCC: field recipients are those being discreetly or surreptitiously informed of the communication and cannot be seen by any of the other addressees.
• or eceive the message without any of the other recipients knowing. Also used for larger mailings (over 50)

It is common practice to use the BCC: field when addressing a very long list of recipients, or a list of recipients that should not (necessarily) know each other, e.g. in mailing lists.

Cc: — Carbon Copy

"Cc" is short for "carbon copy". Those naming and designing this email feature probably had the real world counterpart to email in mind: letters. Carbon copy paper made it possible to send the same letter to two (or even more if you hit the keys really hard) different people without the onerous task of having to write or type it twice.

The analogy works well. An email is sent to the person in the To: field, of course.

A verbatim copy of the message is also sent to all the addresses listed in the Cc: field, though. Yes, there can be more than one email address in this field, and they all get a copy. To enter more than one address in the Cc: field, separate them with commas.

The Shortcomings of Cc:

When you send a message to more than one address using the Cc: field, both the original recipient and all the recipients of the carbon copies see the To: and Cc: fields including all the addresses in them.

This means that every recipient gets to know the email addresses of all the persons that received your message. This is usually not desirable. Nobody likes their email address exposed to the public.

Full Cc: fields also don't look all that good. They can become quite long and grow big on the screen. Lots of email addresses will overshadow little message text.

Bcc: — Blind Carbon Copy

The long version of "Bcc" is "blind carbon copy". If this gives you the image of an empty sheet of paper — a carbon copy without text —, that's not quite what email's Bcc: is up to.

The Bcc: field helps you deal with the problems created by Cc:. As it is the case with Cc:, a copy of the message goes to every single email address appearing in the Bcc: field.

The difference is that neither the Bcc: field itself nor the email addresses in it appear in any of the copies (and not in the message sent to the person in the To: field either).

The only recipient address that will be visible to all recipients is the one in the To: field. So, to keep maximum anonymity you can put your own address in the To: field and use Bcc: exclusively to address your message.

Bcc: lets you send a newsletter, too, or send a message to "undisclosed recipients".

Cc: and Bcc: Etiquette

Bcc: is a nice and powerful tool. But you still should limit its use to cases when it is clear that the message was sent to multiple recipients whose addresses are protected using Bcc:. You could mention the other recipients at the end of the email by name, but not by email address, for example.

In any case, Bcc: not a spying device. How would you feel when a message addressed to you might also have reached a number of other people, but you did not know who?

Send an email with the new interface

A step bye step short video to show how to send an email step by step.

About the mail fields

• TO
• CC
• BCC 

find from the below link
http://o365education.blogspot.com/2013/09/what-is-to-cc-bcc-in-email.html

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How to log in to office 365 for the 1st time

How to log in to office 365 portal as you get you user name and temporary password.

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SkyDrive Pro storage increases making it even better for storing and sharing class work

For me, Office 365 Education just keeps getting better and better. SkyDrive Pro, part of Office 365 Education Plan A2¹, is cloud storage for education, and is the place where students and teachers can store, sync, and share their files across multiple devices with ease and security. To date SkyDrive Pro has offered institutions 7GB of cloud storage per user but yesterday Mark Kashman and Tejas Mehta, senior product managers in the SharePoint team, announced that the SkyDrive pro storage increases making it even better for storing and sharing class work.

¹Plan A2 is free for students, faculty and staff and includes Exchange Online Plan 1, Lync Online Plan 2, SharePoint Online Plan 1 and the Office Web Apps. You can sign up for free online!

Each user now gets 25 GB of SkyDrive Pro storage space

Let’s look at the headlines:

• Each user now gets 25 GB of SkyDrive Pro storage space (up from 7 GB).
• You can now increase users' SkyDrive Pro storage beyond the default 25 GB-up to 50 GB and 100 GB.
• With the new Shared with Me view, you can easily find documents others have shared with you.

I think this is a great improvement for schools, colleges and universities who are using Office 365 Education as it means their students and teachers can keep more files in the cloud, accessible from everywhere, and the fact that an administrator can increase that quota up to 100GB for individuals means that even the most demanding users should still have enough storage to keep them happy for a long time.

Don’t forget that there are applications for SkyDrive Pro on a variety of platforms includingWindows 8 and iOS that make it easier to access your files on the go.

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Back to School with OneNote

As a college student, Liz Scoble loved using OneNote to keep all of her class notes organized and stay on top of her daily to-do's. She recently joined the OneNote team after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis. Here, Liz shares her favourite OneNote features for staying productive in school.

Keeping my life organized in college was not an easy feat. Between classes, extracurricular activities, and the work associated with each, I struggled to stay on top of everything that I needed to do. Thankfully, once I began to use OneNote to keep track of everything, I felt much more organized and productive. Here are some of the ways I used OneNote in college and features that I relied on to keep my life organized.

Daily task lists

With a busy schedule and lots of classes to keep track of, I found that the best method of organizing my schedule was making detailed daily task lists. I constantly checked, edited, and updated these lists, so I also colour-coded them so I could see at a glance the type of work I had to do. Black was for classes, red was for due dates or exams, blue was for meetings, and green was for individual work. I loved using the to-do tag in OneNote (which you can add with CTRL+1), because it made it easy for me to see when I'd completed a task.

The wiki-linking feature can also be very helpful for keeping track of your notes associated with items on your task list. To add a link to a different page in your notebook, simply type your page title with double brackets on either end (example: [[To Do List]] ) and it will automatically become a link to that page, marked by a dotted underline. This feature helped me organize notes and make my task lists more useful.

Search notes

One of the features that makes OneNote so useful for keeping all of your class notes is that you can search through them, even if they are handwritten. I loved that I could write down due dates and assignments right in my class notes, and then easily find them when it was time to complete the assignment. When I took notes with pencil and paper, I would have to open my class notebook, find the lecture notes, and scan the pages for where I had jotted down the assignment. With OneNote, all you have to do is type a keyword into the search bar, and all of the pages that contain the keyword immediately show up.

Send to OneNote

I received tons of handouts for each of my classes and often struggled to keep them organized. I would usually print files that were emailed to the class or uploaded to the class website so that I could keep track of the content on the printouts and take any necessary notes. As you can probably imagine, my folders quickly filled up, my printing credit dwindled, and my backpack got progressively heavier. Once I started using OneNote to organize my class notes, a solution to this problem quickly became apparent. Using the Send to OneNote tool, I kept all of my handouts organized in their respective section of my OneNote notebook.  Not only did this save me time (and paper), but it also allowed me to annotate handouts and quickly search through my growing collection of class content.

The Send to OneNote tool also helped me take more organized notes in class. If a professor lectured from a PowerPoint presentation in class, I would upload the presentation to OneNote. Instead of taking separate notes and trying to match them up with the presentation after class, I took notes directly on the slides. Drawing arrows to points of the slide that I wanted to associate notes with, underlining key content, and taking notes in the margins of the slide made it so much easier for me when it came time to study for exams.

OneNote on the go

One of my favourite things about OneNote is that I can access my notes anywhere. When I was waiting in line for coffee or at a bus stop, it was easy to access my daily task list using OneNote on my phone. If I wanted to work in a computer lab, I could access my notes on SkyDrive. I love that I never have to worry about forgetting my notes somewhere, because they are with me wherever I go!

Are there any features in OneNote that you love to use? Comment to let us know!

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Windows To Go: A Deployment Guide for Education

Windows To Go is a feature of the Windows 8 Enterprise operating system that enables the operating system to run from a USB drive. Using Windows To Go in an education environment provides numerous benefits to faculty and students alike. It enables faculty and students to use a personalized copy of Windows 8 on virtually any PC, at almost any location.

This guide provides an overview of Windows To Go deployment for schools. It is for IT pros and discusses the benefits, limitations, and processes involved in deploying Windows To Go.

The full guide can be viewed/downloaded below:

Download the guide from here.

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Top ten tips for using Office 365 education

Top Tip #10 – Blogging in SharePoint Online

Whether you want a class blog, or your own blog to share with your students, the blogging capabilities in SharePoint Online allow teachers and students to quickly and easily write up their thoughts, ideas and showcase their progress in a secure environment. You can even customise the look and feel of the blogs to make them more appealing for younger pupils.

Top Tip #9 – Multiple Co-Authoring in Office Web Apps

Working on class projects has never been easier thanks to the Office Web Apps and their ability to support multiple authors of spreadsheets and documents at the same time! Being able to collaborate on work in the classroom (and at home!) is really important and the Office Web Apps enable anyone with access to a supported browser and an Internet connection to get involved.

Top Tip #8 – Excel Surveys

How many times have you needed to survey your students and staff for their feedback? This doesn’t just apply to teaching and learning, but also the IT department, facilities, finance, almost anyone in the institution. It couldn’t be more simple to create a survey in Excel that can capture a variety of answer types (yes/no, multiple choice, text, date, etc.) into a spreadsheet automatically. This can be shared amongst your students and staff, or publicly.

Student feedback is particularly important in universities. Many still spend time printing thousands of sheets of paper each year only to have to input that data back into a computer! Why not cut out the paper middle-man and use an Excel Survey?

Top Tip #7 – Following content in SharePoint Online

In a mature SharePoint Online environment there might be thousands of sites, files and other content that may or may not be useful to every student or member of staff. Sometimes you stumble upon a really useful resource either by searching or by accident and now you can keep track of it by following the content in your newsfeed.

Top Tip #6 – Outlook Web App on Mobile Devices

When a school, TAFE or university is using shared devices, such as tablets, it isn’t always possible to personally configure the applications for a particular user; this is where the web apps in Office 365 really come into their own. The Outlook Web App on mobile devices is excellent, and will automatically switch format based on the type of device you’re using whether it’s a mobile phone, tablet or full PC device.

Top Tip #5 – Multiple Calendar Views in OWA

This is one of my favourite tips. In the Outlook Web App you can add multiple calendars to view on one screen. This is extremely useful when it comes to planning tutorials, meetings, and other events as you can overlay many people’s calendars to see when the most suitable time would be to arrange something. No more lengthy email threads trying to work out when everyone can make it!

There are even Microsoft partners out there who have developed solutions to automatically fill your calendar with your school timetable so that it’s available instantly, wherever you go.

Top Tip #4 – Drag ‘n’ Drop in SkyDrive Pro

Uploading files to anywhere in the past has always been a bit of a chore. Having to click browse, find your individual file, upload and repeat quickly becomes a nightmare. In the new Office 365 you can simply drag and drop multiple files into a documents library and see them get uploaded automatically – simple!

Top Tip #3 – Lync Online Web Scheduler

If you don’t have Outlook client available to you then scheduling a Lync meeting might seem like an impossible task; not so with the Lync Online Web Scheduler. Now it’s easy to configure your meeting settings via the browser. With the latest updates to Office 365 you can event schedule a Lync Online meeting straight from the Outlook Web App.

Top Tip #2 – SharePoint Online Social Networking

The humble # symbol probably never thought it would get such exposure before Twitter launched, but now the #hashtag is king, with @mentions and “likes” not far behind. In SharePoint Online you can use these familiar social networking features to share content and conversations with others in your class.

Top Tip #1 – Offline Access

I’d like to think we live in a world where connection to the Internet is practically everywhere, but speak to anyone who has been along the coast, away from a city recently and they’ll tell you that being offline is not unusual! Thankfully, just because you’re using services that are in the cloud does not mean that you suffer when you lose your Internet access. With the new Office 365 there is an offline mode for OWA, and of course the old favourite, the Office and SkyDrive Pro clients to keep you going when your connection lets you down.

Top Tip #0 – Supercharged Office 365 Storage

This is my bonus tip! Since putting the original top 10 tips together we’ve supercharged the storage options in Office 365. Now students and staff get to benefit from 25 GB of free SkyDrive Pro storage, with options to increase that up to 100 GB! Equally, students, staff and alumni also get their inbox quotas doubled from 25 GB to 50 GB, free!

Helpfully, we’ve also increased the individual file upload limits from 250 MB per file to 2 GB per file, and made it even easier to restore documents. Now it’s much easier to store those important multimedia or design technology coursework files online, securely, and accessible from anywhere.

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