Do you need to use a Euro symbol in an economics paper? How about a Celsius degree in a lab report? Or, maybe you need to insert special characters into your math homework. I recently discovered the Math AutoCorrect feature in Word and realized that I could use it for more than just math stuff.

Math AutoCorrect lets me insert symbols and special characters into my documents using keyboard shortcuts. Click the full post to watch a short video where I demonstrate how to insert symbols and special characters into a Word 2010 or Word 2007 document. I also provide step-by-step instructions and keyboard shortcuts, if that's your preference.

Kelli Etheredge uses OneNote features like shared notebooks, linked notes, and screen clipping to engage her World Literature class in a poetry lesson. It's a 2-day unit where Kelli and her 10th grade students' read, analyze, and discuss haiku and tanka forms of Japanese poetry.

It's a quick and fun lesson that let's Kelli pique her students' curiosity in poetry and develops their critical thinking skills.

Read the full blog post for instructions on how to use the OneNote features that Kelli uses in this lesson.

With Office Web Apps all of your students can use Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Excel for their school assignments... for free! Files are viewable, editable, and sharable virtually anywhere there's an Internet connection.

You'll find helpful and informative videos and downloadable step-by-step instructions to guide you through creating a new document, setting up a shared folder in Windows Live SkyDrive, printing a document from the browser, and more.

Read the full blog post for details on how you can incorporate Office Web Apps into your curriculum.

With Office Web Apps and Windows Live SkyDrive you and your team members can rock out a great group project without meeting in person all of the time. Windows Live SkyDrive gives you 25 gigabytes of FREE online file storage! Why not cash in on that? Just save your files to a shared folder on SkyDrive and give your team members access. 

Watch this short video to see how easy it is to create a SkyDrive folder, upload files, and use Office Web Apps. Read the full post for details.

Using Microsoft OneNote to collect their research and develop their arguments, Kelli Etheredge's 10th grade World Literature class holds a mock trial to determine if the Count of Monte Cristo is guilty as charged.

This is just one lesson plan that Kelli designed to incorporate OneNote and Windows Live SkyDrive. As she puts it, "Using OneNote has transformed my class!"

Watch this video to see her students in action and read the full blog post for details on how they prepared for their mock trial.

Connecting teachers and students can be a tricky business. Hopefully, you teach and they learn. But unless you have the perfect dynamic between teachers and students, there's often a gap between what you're trying to get across and what they're actually picking up. How do you know which students are getting it, and which ones are falling behind? What if you could insert questions into your presentation, and then get instant feedback? Or maybe mark up your slides, and have those notes appear in a OneNote notebook for students?

To find out more and to download the add-in, read the full post.

Get inspired by examples of how schools customized SharePoint to deliver community flyers, promote faculty achievements, support a distrcit-wide online calendar for parents, and create class Web sites for teachers and students.

In this collection of posts and videos you can watch testimonials and see real SharePoint solution designs and logic architecture plans.

Read my full blog post for details. 

How much e-mail do you get every day? I'm guessing the answer is "too much". What with planning lessons, teaching, grading assignments, reporting to your principal and stuff, email is just another time-consuming task. How about letting your computer do some of the work? 

Read the full blog post for 7 Outlook tips (including step-by-step instructions) that will save you time and help you get organized. 

Did you know that you can insert professionally formatted formulas and equations into your Word documents? That means you can do your math homework in Word and not get docked points for your illegible handwriting. In addition to that, the free Microsoft Mathematics Add-In for Word and OneNote lets you solve equations and expressions containing real and complex numbers and even plot 2D and 3D graphs. Don't get too excited. It doesn't do all the work for you. You'll still need to show how you solved an equation, but at least this way you can check your work and see if you're getting the correct answer.

If you're a math teacher or student, check out the following video where I demonstrate how to solve equations and plot graphs using the Mathematics Add-In with Microsoft Word 2010. If you're interested in more free math resources, read my full blog post.

Did you know that it's easy to create a bibliography based on common citation formats in Microsoft Word?

A few months ago, we were asking students about how they write a research paper. Jon, a freshman at a local community college, had just completed a huge term paper that counted for a large percentage of his overall grade in a class. While describing how he wrote this paper, he told me he hated writing bibliographies because he couldn't remember the proper format for citing sources. Unaware that Word has a built-in solution to his problem, he had turned to an online alternative. When I told him about the citation generator in Word he said, "Word does what? Where's that at?"

Check out my full blog post to learn how it's done.