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!

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.

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!

This post about teachers sharing their presentations with students using  Broadcast Slide Show in PowerPoint 2010 was written by Joy Miller.

Nowadays, students bring their laptops, smartphones, and iPads into the classroom to take notes, research online, and work on assignments.  But for many students, it can be difficult to see a presentation from the back of a large lecture hall. Why not embrace the use of digital devices and invite them "in" to your lectures?

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!

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.

Today's blog post is brought to you by Roxanne Kension. Roxanne is a writer for Office Web Apps and mother of a very adorable kindergartner.

When you attach a Word document in e-mail, Word Web App lets Hotmail recipients view the attachment in their web browser. They don’t even need Microsoft Word installed on their computer. This is a handy feature that lets my son’s kindergarten teacher share her class newsletter with me.

I even recorded a video showing you my experience. Click the full post to see how it works.

Today's blog post is brought to you by Tami Amador. Tami is our resident math writer and overall Renaissance woman.

Today is Pi Day! That's π, as in the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, better known as the mathematical constant beginning with 3.14. We celebrate pi on March 14, or 3/14, because the date represents the first three digits of π in decimal form.

In 1989, physicist Larry Shaw created Pi Day, which was celebrated at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where staff and members of the public marched in a circle and then ate fruit pies. To get in the spirit, sit back with a piece of pie and watch this hilarious parody of the well-known Eminem hit, “Lose Yourself,” which tells the tale of a Pi Day competition. And be sure to read the full blog post about  this holiday for fans of the never-ending pi.

On our new Preservice Teachers website, you'll find links to lesson plans, Office tools for teachers, classroom management strategies, and teacher communities that will help get your student teaching off on the right foot.

I've spoken with a number of students who plan to make education their career, and one common theme seems to be "OMG! Can I do this? What have I gotten myself into?" So if you feel this way, you aren't alone.

On the website you'll hear a principal/superintendent talk about his expectations for student teachers and identify what he sees as common pitfalls. I've also included links to teacher blogs...

This post about using Office Web Apps and Windows Live SkyDrive with Office for Mac 2011 was written by Dawn Reeder, a writer for Office for Mac.

Tired of lugging your MacBook from home to school and back again? Then it's a good thing that Office for Mac 2011 works with Office Web Apps. This means you can access your documents from any computer with an Internet connection—even from … gasp … a PC!

When you save your documents to Windows Live SkyDrive, which offers 25 GB of free online storage, then you can access and edit your documents using Office Web Apps.

If you’d like to lighten your load and leave your MacBook at home, read the full blog post for details.