Learning Essentials adds curriculum-based templates and toolbars to Microsoft Office Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to guide students and teachers through projects. There is a separate set of tools for teachers and students. Some language versions include tools to create e-learning content that conforms to SCORM standards.
Educator and Student Centers
Centers give educators and students a starting place for common assignments and tasks and guide them through a customizable interface to encourage project completion.
Templates & Toolbars
Templates help educators and students get beyond the blank page and produce high-quality work. Readily available toolbars bring together Office resources and commands for writing, presentations, math and science, and foreign languages.
Tutorials & Project Assistance
"Just in time" guidance and coaching from leading education publishers and expert Microsoft Office users can be seen side-by-side with work in progress. Handy Checklists help track progress within an assignment.
SCORM Tools
Convert Microsoft Office documents into standards-based objects that can be managed and reused by any SCORM-conformant learning management system. (Available for English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish language versions only.)
Free Office tools for schools help students and teachers shine
Learning Essentials, designed with teachers for teachers, helps make best use of precious planning time, create top-quality learning experiences, and speed throug every-day administrative tasks.
38 tutorials from content partners have fresh ideas and tools for designing great projects, evaluating writing, and integrating technology in instruction. Find new teaching strategies and classroom activities for Language Arts, Math, Science and Social Studies.
117 templates with Project Assistance help you quickly prepare classroom handouts, grading rubrics, assessments, worksheets and more. Project Assistance provides contextual guidance and coaching from leading education publishers on implementing best practices. Use the Create Test Wizard to design tests and quizzes without worrying about formatting.
An integrated Content Development Kit with simple templates help teachers create their own materials for Learning Essentials.
Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) content authoring standards allow seamless conversion of Microsoft Office and Web documents into standards-based objects – reusable by any SCORM conformant learning management system. The SCORM tools are a component of the comprehensive THESIS 3.0 e-learning solution from HunterStone, a Microsoft Gold Partner and a leading provider of e-learning and IT Tools for Microsoft environments. SCORM Tools are available for English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish language versions only.
Student Tools
Because getting started is hard, Learning Essentials provides assignment-specific guidance in Microsoft Office applications such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. With curriculum-based templates, tools, and tutorials, Learning Essentials helps with a variety of subjects and assignments, from history reports and essays to physics projects and chemistry labs.
Easy-to-use and intuitive tools, templates, and tutorials help students spend less time formatting so they can concentrate on the core learning in their assignments. Developed in cooperation with distinguished academic publishers, Learning Essentials includes tips and tutorials for managing projects and creating high-quality reports, presentations, science projects, and other assignments.
Learning Essentials unlocks tools in Microsoft Office specially designed for foreign language study, providing templates for completing assignments in Spanish, French, and German. Language templates are automatically set to the specified language, giving students immediate access to diacritical marks, special characters and language-specific spell check and translation tools.
Click through tutorials and side-by-side Project Assistance from leading educational publishers provide academic guidance for students and best practices for educators so they can do their best work. For example, the 28 student tutorials include The Writing Process, which helps students successfully complete the four basic stages of writing.
The Using Manipulatives tutorial demonstrates best practices in the use of manipulatives in math instruction. More than 35 other tutorials address classroom management issues, using new assessment tools, and technology enhanced teaching strategies by subject area.
Content you Create
Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office is an open framework that enables education content developers – both educational publishers and educators – to create additional resources using simple XML-based authoring for deep integration with the world's most-used classroom productivity suite.
The Content Development Kit is integrated with Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office 2.0 to enable educators, publishers and other content developers to create additional Learning Essentials templates and tutorials.
With the Learning Essentials CDK you can:
Create new education templates for Word, PowerPoint and Excel
Link education-specific Office toolbars to your templates
Provide project assistance to provide step-by-step guidance for students or teachers
Create tutorials that provide academic instruction or professional development that incorporate the use of Microsoft Office tools
Link templates to your tutorials to help students or teachers to turn your strategies into action
You can download Learning Essentials immediately at no cost. Learning Essentials is a set of tools that enhance the Microsoft Office Suite. If you don't have Microsoft Office, see this information about education-related purchasing of Microsoft Office.
