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Re: OneNote, EverNote -- Used to organize entire manuals or help systems?
Subject:Re: OneNote, EverNote -- Used to organize entire manuals or help systems? From:Gregory P Sweet <gps03 -at- health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us> To:Nancy Allison <maker -at- verizon -dot- net> Date:Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:59:20 -0500
I use it to accumulate notes and materials that are sorted and organized to
create an outline of the products. All actual authoring takes place in the
appropriate authoring tool (Word, RoboHelp, Captivate, Powerpoint, etc.)
Most of my project include multiple products, for example a single
synchronous class will include:
A software manual
A participant guide/workbook
A leader guide/script for presenting the course
Any required ancillary worksheets, quick references, etc. required for the
class
And sometimes a help system is ordered for the software as well.
I use OneNote primarily to manage my work on the project and develop the
course materials. I create a notebook for each course and each notebook
contains seven sections:
Course information -- course description/title, LMS course no., Intended
audience, course objectives, credits offered /grant deliverables
fulfilled.
Presentation worksheet -- 12 questions to answer before planning any
presentation, taken from Presentation Zen: p.61, Reynolds, G.,
ISBN:0-321-52565-5
Interaction worksheet -- maps course deliverables to interactions or
activities the students will complete to learn and demonstrate mastery
of the objective.
Exercise plans -- Interactions refined and planned out. This is where
synchronous training really diverges from traditional classrooms as you
have to be fluent in your technology to create engaging and meaningful
interactions.
General course notes -- this is where I gather or sketch any visuals I
might need, note any ancillary documents, whether or not a manual or
help system will be included. Note that if I am creating any art for a
course, I'll do a rough sketch in my notebook but use something like
SketchBook Pro for the finished piece.
Outline -- include pages for all documents to be created. Timing
included for leader guide.
Reference materials such as Bloom's Taxonomy, platform specific notes,
etc.
Once the outlines and skecthes are done then I move on to primary authoring
tools. I typically start out in Powerpoint and draft my script inlcuding
all talking parts and blocking in the notes area. the PPT gets dumped into
a leadrguide template in Word where it is formatted to be used easily
during a class, and timing added. Once that's done I move onto the
participant guide and any ancillary materials. Software manuals & help
systems would be developed in parrallel with the leader guide.
It's slightly different for a self-paced course, as I swap out the
presentation worksheet for a storyboard. For stand alone manuals, or help
systems I simply trim the note books of the unneeded sections.
Cheers!
-Greg
techwr-l-bounces+gps03=health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com wrote on
01/11/2012 09:55:55 AM:
> From: Nancy Allison <maker -at- verizon -dot- net>
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Date: 01/11/2012 09:56 AM
> Subject: OneNote, EverNote -- Used to organize entire manuals or help
systems?
> Sent by: techwr-l-bounces+gps03=health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
>
>
> I've got a project that will combine content from two different
> documents, and there is no clean way to integrate them. It will be a
> real cut-and-paste job, with lots of additional new writing. I can
> see how great it could be to have each snippet on a separate OneNote
> page and move them easily within OneNote, but if I do it for the
> entire project, I'll have dozens of pages. I don't see a way to
> autonumber them, so I'll go a bit cross-eyed trying to remember
> where in the long list of pages a particular page resides . . .
>
> Is it usable in this way, with the equivalent of, say, 150 typical
> 8.5 x 11 pages of technical text needing to be moved hither and yon
> until the book takes shape?
>
> Or, do you use it to accumulate notes, but then integrate them into
> your usual tool (Word, FM, whatever) as you go along?
>
> Or, do you do something else?
>
> I can see how the pages could also be used to organize help topics.
> Is it worth doing as a preliminary to using the actual HAT, which of
> course offers a lot more functions?
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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