Tags & Templates in OneNote

Tags and templates are proving very useful to me in my everyday planning.  Perhaps more importantly, getting to grips with these simple tools on a personal level has enabled me to set up, very quickly and efficiently, my Class Notebooks in a more visually engaging way that allows my students to access tasks easily and to see at a glance how they are progressing through their work.

Having set my OneNote Notebook up with my sections and pages as I wanted them (bearing in mind that I can easily change this set up at any point) the next step for me was to start using tags and templates effectively.  

Tags are a great way to organise your work (and your students' work in Class Notebook) and you can personalise tags in any way you see fit.  You can see from the image below how simple it is to insert tags from the Home button and how easy it is personalise them.  

As you can see here, I have created, amongst others, a couple of tags to help me see at a glance what planning and marking I need to do.  There is a long list of tags already available to use and adapt.  To make life easier for myself, I simply use these tags and set them up on a page template which I call planning.  This means that each time I wish to insert a new page in my To Do section of my Notebook I simply insert my template. 

As well as templates you have created yourself there are also templates available to use immediately or that can be adapted to your needs.

If there is a template that you intend to use regularly, as I have for example with my weekly to-do template,  then this can be set as a default template.

Tags and templates could be ignored as being too peripheral and of little use to us as educators but I think these simple tools can have a big impact and should not be overlooked.

What do you think?