Enhancing Education- OneNote Updates

Akins IT • January 30, 2017

Following collaboration with teachers, Microsoft announced a series of new features coming soon to OneNote- Class Notebook for Windows desktop app and OneNote- Class Notebook online.

The new add-ins give teachers the ability to distribute pages and sections to all their students with just the click of a button. Teachers are now able to sequentially review work with tools that navigate and filter student’s notebooks.

Microsoft is also improving the learning tools Add-Ins by localizing six more languages (Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Chinese (simplified)m and Chinese (traditional). The learning tools Add-ins will also support an additional three languages (Russian, Portuguese, and Chinese). Users will be able to use “explicit punctuation,” which inputs the correct punctuation upon speech dictation. For example, you can dictate a sentence and end it by saying “period,” and the tool will input the period punctuation. *Update: Any admin who deploys Learning Tools will be able to control the display of the Update button on client machines who have the correct permission. *

One cool feature Microsoft introduced is stickers. Teachers can personalize stickers with their own message to comment on student’s work. The sticker feature is only available on OneNote Online as of now, but will be rolling out to the Add-Ins desktop app in coming weeks- along with various sticker packs.

To finish the announcement strong, Microsoft introduced new partners it will support for embedding content in OneNote (Quizlet, ThinkLink, GeoGebra, Wizer, and Sketchfab 3D).

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AWS stumbled this morning. Here’s why multi‑cloud keeps you moving.

By Shawn Akins • October 20, 2025

October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)