According to a survey released Thursday from the National Survey of Student Engagement, many students fail to use effective study techniques to help them succeed in school. The New York Times reported, "The great majority of students take notes in class, but fewer than two-thirds review them later, and even fewer take notes while reading."

Whatever your philosophy on test taking, they haven’t been abolished yet. So get prepared! Don’t just madly cram for a test the night before. You can do better than that. Get organized!

While you’re in class taking notes, use a special tag to mark the material you know (or think) you’ll be tested on. Then focus your exam prep time on those notes. OneNote gives you an easy way to do that; it’s called a tag.

I recommend creating a custom tag in OneNote called “Exam material”.

Find out how!

As you reluctantly come back from vacation and return to your regular school schedules, you might need a jumpstart to get you back into your routines.

What kind of school work will you need to do? Write a report with an MLA-formatted bibliography? Or collaborate on a presentation? How are your math skills?

I've pulled together 20 Office tips to help you get back in the school groove.

Meet Kelvin Dueck, a physics and math teacher at Pitt Meadows Secondary School. Kelvin wanted a way to share his math answer keys and physics notes with his students. That way his students could access help and extend their learning outside of traditional classroom walls. He was looking for a virtual hard drive. He was looking for Windows Live SkyDrive.

Read the full blog post and listen to Kelvin's testimonial. You'll be inspired!

Did you recently get a new computer for the upcoming school year? Find out how to protect your investment from inadvertently downloaded malware (malicious software).

Malware can cause your computer to run slowly or possibly not even run at all.

During class you present your carefully prepared PowerPoint slides and you hope everyone is listening. But what if your students get confused and don't ask for clarification? How do you share your PowerPoint with them, so they can go through the material at their own pace?

Try embedding your PowerPoint presentation into a blog post.

A new school year is fast approaching. Teachers everywhere are dusting off their school supplies and getting ready for their next batch of students. But what can they do differently this year to communicate with students outside of class hours?  

Queue WordPress and Windows Live Writer—with these tools you can easily create and manage your very own blog.

Take a look!

Last month I attended the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) 2011 conference in Philadelphia. For three days I worked the booth and walked the halls listening to the questions that teachers and school IT professionals were asking.

Get the scoop on what we were demonstrating at the Microsoft booth. If you weren’t able to attend ISTE and have a question, feel free to post your question as a comment on this blog. I’m interested to hear what technologies have piqued your curiosity.

Earlier in the year I worked with Beth Melton, an Excel MVP, to create a super easy and visual gradebook template in Excel 2010. It’s built for teachers with little to no Microsoft Excel experience. In fact, all of the grade calculation formulas are taken care of for you. We built the template in Excel 2010, because of all the new 2010 data visualization features. It even includes a printable student progress report!

Take a look at what this new gradebook template has to offer.

Put together your school's yearbook, or your own souvenir photo yearbook for your friends, using Hewlett Packard's cloud publishing site, MagCloud. Microsoft Publisher has partnered with HP MagCloud to give you on-demand publishing straight from the application. No upfront cost commitment. It's just 20 cents a page. Take a look!