One of the most important tasks you do as a teacher is planning your lessons. An effective and well-designed lesson plan means less confusion in the classroom, which allows you to focus your attention on your students. And it can mean less work for the next school year, because a successful lesson plan can be used again and again.

Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 can help you create useful lesson plans efficiently. By using OneNote, you can organize your plan by sections — Title Page, Materials, Instructional Procedures, Student Assessments, and so on. While you're teaching, you can easily search your plan and update sections or take notes as necessary. Afterward, you can make necessary modifications, noting what worked — and what didn't — so that you can use the plan during the next school year.

Looking for inspiration? Try the Lesson plan locator, a tool that helps you find case studies, how-to articles, sample lesson plans, tutorials, and more to enrich your students' learning experience.

Interested in changes that your colleagues might propose to your lesson plan? Or would you like to share a particularly successful plan with other teachers? You can send your OneNote file by e-mail, or post your lesson plan to a shared site for easy access and collaboration.

The following links take you to the tools you need to create great lesson plans.

• Plan effective lessons (Article)
  Find out how to craft a plan that gets students' attention and helps them learn successfully.
• Teachers: It's OneNote to the rescue! (Article)
  Learn to organize, store, and easily recapture lesson plans and other information while teaching.
• OneNote Tips and Tricks — Level 100 (Webcast)
  Let a technology specialist show you how to make the most of OneNote.
• Lesson planner (Template)
  Use this OneNote template to create your lesson plan.
• Lesson plan locator (Tool)
  Enrich and broaden your lesson plans by using this tool to search for case studies, how-to articles, lesson plans, and tutorials.
• OneNote for teachers (Product Tour)
  See what class lists, syllabii, student assessment notes, and classroom aids look like in OneNote.
• About sharing notes with others (Article)
  Explore the various ways that you can share your OneNote notes with other teachers.