From little acorns do big trees grow
It's never easy to predict where ideas from this blog will go. I received an email recently which mentioned my blog (indirectly) and the results from a teacher in B.C. asking me some questions about OneNote. Here's a cleaned up version of the email:
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I wanted to take a moment and report the results of a unique blog/video content opportunity that [a]fellow writer and I pursued for the Office Blog in the second half of 2011.
A schoolteacher in British Columbia had originally reached out to a OneNote tester on MSDN, praising the benefits of OneNote in his classroom, but also expressing frustration with Microsoft’s lack of evangelizing the product’s usefulness in the public school sector—both for teachers as well as for students. As Office blog curators,[we] thought that this would make a great customer story and, not knowing exactly where the road would lead us, took a road trip to Canada to meet up with the teacher and his students. We first got a sense of his world over dinner and then spent the entire next day shooting video at the school to capture how our technology benefits him and his kids.
When we came back, we packaged our newfound knowledge into the following pieces that were published on the OneNote Blog:
- Blog post: “Teaching with OneNote: How students benefit” (July, 2011)
https://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2011/07/28/teaching-with-onenote-how-students-benefit.aspx
A chronicle of our trip to meet with the teacher and learn about his use of technology in the classroom. This post served as the container for the main video (see below). - Video: “OneNote in class at Pitt Meadows Secondary School” (July, 2011)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5X_iSRNueU&hd=1
This video promotes the teacher’s story and his use of OneNote in the classroom. - Blog post: “6 reasons why I used OneNote to plan a project” (September 2011)
https://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2011/09/29/6-reasons-why-i-used-onenote-to-plan-a-collaborative-project.aspx
During the Back to School campaign, we published this productivity summary that shows how we used our own technology to plan the trip and interview.
It serves as a great example of how investing in real customer stories can have a big payoff in the street cred we gain in our user communities, especially when we don’t look and sound like a polished marketing campaign in the process.
I really hope we have a chance to do more of this kind of work in the future. Our customers really seem to like it.
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Thanks for the email summary from the writers of the OneNote blog. Always great to see where these "offshoots" go! One simple contact from this blog set all that in motion. (And a quick thanks to the White Stripes for a good blog title today. I’m listening to “Little Acorns” right now).
Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John