Teaching in the future with Microsoft Interactive Classroom

Sometimes you discover a great learning tool, hidden somewhere on the web. The Microsoft Interactive Classroom is such a tool, and it gives us a taste of what classroom training might be in the (near) future. If you have ever wondered if they was way you could avoid printing tons of paper manuals, if you are tired of distributing PowerPoint handouts that nobody ever uses, this is for you.

Basically, it is an add-on to PowerPoint and OneNote (2007 or 2010). As a teacher, you use PowerPoint to prepare your slides as usual, and you can use the Microsoft Interactive Classroom add-on to add question slides in your presentation. You get an extra tab in the ribbon for that:

Once you start giving your session, you click the Start Session button. This starts a broadcast of your presentation on the network. Your screen will look like this:

With the ribbon, you can annotate your slides (works great if you have a tablet!) but also start polls, display the results of the poll to your students…

But the best feature is yet to come. Your students connect to your broadcasted session with… OneNote! They automatically get a copy of the slides as a separate note page, they can take their own notes on the slides, they see the annotations of the instructor in their OneNote… and after the session they go home with their own annotated lesson material. Of course, they need to be connected to the same network (wired or wireless).

We tried it during an interactive session of one hour with 20 workstations and it was quite impressive. And what is even better: it’s free!

Update: this tool is now officially part of Microsoft OneNote and called OneNote Class Notebook: https://www.onenote.com/classnotebook

Stubborn OneNote: cannot rename notebook section

My favorite note-taking tool, Microsoft OneNote, has been bothering me for quite a while with a strange issue: for some reason, it renamed a section called “Customer notes” to “Customer notes 2”, and I could not change it back.

After some investigation, this was the origin of the problem:

  • My notebook was synced to a SharePoint document library
  • It was probably called “Customer notes” before, but a sync conflict added a second section “Customer notes 2”
  • I deleted “Customer notes” and tried to remove the 2 in “Customer notes 2”, but no luck.

The cause: when you have a section that contains attachments, OneNote creates a subfolder called <name of section>_onefiles. When I deleted the section “Customer notes”, it did NOT delete the folder “Customer Notes_onefiles”. That’s why I could not rename “Customer notes 2” to “Customer notes”, because the corresponding subfolder “Customer notes_onefiles” already existed.

I deleted the old “Customer notes_onefiles” and then I could rename my section. I’m a happy OneNoter again !

Readings to prepare for the SharePoint 2010 IT Pro exams

A couple of weeks ago, I passed the beta version of the two SharePoint 2010 IT Pro exams:

  • Exam 70-668: PRO: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Administrator
  • Exam 70-667: MCTS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring

Of course, I can’t tell you much about the actual content of the exam (NDA, you know…) but as long as there are no official “exam preparation guides”, I would recommend you to prepare for the exam by reading the Planning, Upgrade and Deployment guides for SharePoint 2010. The Technet site has a good overview of the downloadable content for SharePoint 2010.

Duplicate categories when creating new blog post from Word 2007 in SharePoint blog

Our marketing department is using Word 2007 to post articles on a SharePoint 2007 blog. Today, a weird issue came up: when you select a category from the drop-down list, that category was created on the SharePoint blog every time, no matter if it existed already or not. This results in duplicate categories in the SharePoint blog.

The solution to this problem is very simple: on the SharePoint site, check the Categories list for items that have a space at the end. If an item in the category list has a space, it gets recreated again when you select the category in Word.