"'Education is the Science of Relations'; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of––
'Those first-born affinities,
That fit our new existence to existing things.'"

Charlotte Mason, A Philosophy of Education
with a quote from The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Sunday, May 24, 2009

OneNote and Lesson Planning

I am an organizer. In fact, I have a tendency to organize the things I am doing more than actually doing them (ugh!)

Because I create my own curriculum, lesson planning involves pulling together resources--books, files, and web links. In the past I would create Word files and school folders to get this stuff together. It was O.K.

Recently OneNote was discussed on a homeschool forum, and everyone was raving about it. I realized I already had this program installed on my computer as part of Office 2007, so I gave it a try. Now I'm raving about it!

The program is designed like a notebooks. You can have as many notebooks as you like. Within each notebook are tabs. You can insert as many tabs, or even grouped tabs as you like. In each tab there are pages, and even subpages of which you can insert as many as you like.

The pages are more dynamic than Word documents. You can put the cursor anywhere on the page and start typing, and a new text box is created. These boxes can be moved around anywhere on the page. You can insert files, links to files, web links, pictures, web clippings, tables, spreadsheets, whatever!

I have started lesson planning for next year, and this has been the most useful tool I have ever used for this because I can easily put everything in one place. For an ecclectic Charlotte Mason homeschooler, it's a great resource!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I would love to hear more of the specifics about how you utilize OneNote in your homeschooling/home management/etc.