The more you learn about OneNote, the more likely you are to embrace it as one of the best teaching and learning tools available today.
If you would ask me, 'What is a OneNote Class Notebook?' I would say that for me it is the digital space that connects students and teachers of one class into a virtual learning community. In 2015, I started using OneNote Class Notebooks to create e-Portfolios for 5 th -grade students to foster autonomous learning and 21 st -century skills. Click Class Notebook to open the application. You should now see the Welcome to the OneNote Class Notebook page as well as four tiles to choose from: Create a class notebook, Add or remove students, Add or remove teachers and Manage Notebooks. Create a Class Notebook. Enter the name of your class. Click Next to continue.
With OneNote Class Notebook, all of your students' notebooks are just a click away. Empowering you to teach the world. With OneNote, you are in control. If you want to scribble and doodle with digital ink, you can. If you want to keep a private notebook, you can. If you want to share a notebook with the world, you can. Class Notebook tab. If you have a Teacher license in your school's Microsoft 365 subscription, or if you have administrative rights to a class notebook, the Class Notebook tab will be visible in OneNote for Windows 10. To turn on the tab manually, open Settings Options, and set Class Notebook tools to On. Distribute a page to students. OneNote Class Notebook Add-In. If you do not do the following, you will have to use the Class Notebook tile on Office 365 to make any edits to your class notebooks. Back when we started on the Class Notebook Creator page (see below left), there's a tiny option below the tiles (before).
OneNote is often described as a digital 3-ring binder, or considered to be the Swiss Army Knife of note-taking. That description covers the basics, but over the years OneNote has gained many new features designed with education in mind. It has now blossomed into a comprehensive teaching and learning framework that belongs in every learner's toolbox.
These are just 10 great ways in which OneNote earns its place in your classroom:
1. Organizing
OneNote is versatile and adapts to anyone's note-taking preferences. You can organize digital notebooks by Sections and Pages in a way that makes sense to you. Some like to organize information based on time; Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, etc. Others like to organize by content; Chapter 1, Chapter 2. Chapter 3, etc. Others just throw everything together in a pile with little or no organization at all, which is just as valid a choice in OneNote.
2. Accessing, collaborating, and sharing content
Note-taking no longer needs to be a fleeting or lonely experience. With technologies like OneNote, teachers can help students learn long after class time is over. Notes persist over time and can be referred to often for review and deeper understanding.
You can access notes easily and share them with other students to contribute together in near real-time through peer collaboration. Notes can be automatically synced to OneDrive and accessed from a laptop, tablet, or even a mobile phone, long after the lesson is over. It's like having your own copy of every note ever taken available, from any device that can hop online, any time and any day of the year.
3. Presenting content
Oftentimes text is not enough to get your point across. With OneNote, you can easily add text, images, audio, video and digital ink to any page. OneNote also uses an infinite canvas that lets you expand, at will, to add more notes as you need. Try that with a physical piece of paper.
When presenting live, you can pinch and zoom to enlarge areas of the screen you want the audience to pay attention to. Notes can be typed or handwritten, and with free-form digital ink you can annotate documents to draw attention to a particular point. You can easily insert pictures such as screen clips, or add pictures ad hoc via your mobile phone – in the middle of presenting – to address live questions from the audience.
4. Allowing flexible teaching styles
There are many things to manage in the classroom and OneNote lets the teacher decide upon the best pedagogy to use for a given situation. OneNote allows for easy review of older material and provides multiple methods for formative feedback in the moment that it is most effective.
Adding new content is just as easy and a teacher can individualize instruction based upon any student's needs and interests. Flipped-classroom type resources can be organized by scope and sequence to meet individual needs, and can be verified with checks for understanding by using Microsoft Forms.
5. Getting messy with digital ink
Learning is messy and OneNote provides the free-form tools to help you (and your students) think through it. When we first learn something new, we do not yet have all the pieces required to make sense of a topic. We often collect and gather artifacts for learning (OneNote excels at this) but we must also process new learning by combining, re-combining, and assimilating new information. Before we can get to the polished, high-fidelity output a computer can produce, we must first struggle with basic conceptual understanding. Learning is about making meaning and thinking, not just transcribing notes with a keyboard.
6. Presenting wirelessly
I often present content untethered from the front of the classroom using Miracast with my Surface Pro tablet. The pedagogy this enables in face-to-face environments allows for free movement around the room, providing a more effective and responsive learning environment for both myself and my students.
7. Unleashing learning across devices like a symphony
In a world of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), being able to access your notes on a variety of different devices is liberating. You can use OneNote on a PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and even Chromebook devices. I often use my Android phone at the same time I am using OneNote on my PC, while presenting. I can use my mobile phone to add pictures on-the-fly in near real-time and notes are automatically synced to all the devices I use routinely. This multi-device use while teaching and presenting opens up another world for just-in-time learning. Taking advantage of those 'teachable moments' has never been easier.
8. Searching and tagging
Getting my notes into OneNote is one thing, but the true value of note-taking is being able to retrieve that information, at will, when and where you need it. With OneNote your notes are searchable. You can also tag your notes with ready-made tags, or create custom tags of your own to easily find specific notes. OneNote will even search the text within images (OCR) and within handwritten notes (if they are legible, that is).
9. Holding the 'SuperNotebook of Notebooks'
Imagine having 24/7 access to the digital binders for every single student in your class. With OneNote Class Notebook you have exactly that – and no more lugging around physical 3-ring binders. With OneNote Class Notebook, all of your students' notebooks are just a click away.
10. Empowering you to teach the world
With OneNote, you are in control. If you want to scribble and doodle with digital ink, you can. If you want to keep a private notebook, you can. If you want to share a notebook with the world, you can. If you want to record an audio comment for one of your students, you can. If you want to handwrite a complicated mathematical equation, compose music, or sketch your latest invention with digital ink, you can do that too. If you want to embed an online video for a flipped learning lesson, go ahead. If you want to individualize instruction using Microsoft Forms and set up an auto-graded quiz as a check for understanding, you can. If you want to embed multimedia content like YouTube videos, do it. If you want to have your notes read back to your students using the new OneNote Learning Tools, you can.
And if you want to use OneNote in any of the ways I've shared above, now you can.
Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
Eastern Illinois University
Flyer mill 1 6 – templates for pages. Twitter: @tomgrissom
Tom Grissom, Ph.D. is the Director of the Instructional Technology Center at Eastern Illinois University. The ITC is one of the premier teacher education resource centers in the State of Illinois serving the faculty, staff, and students in the College of Education & Professional Studies.
Dr. Grissom is a Microsoft Innovative Education Expert (MIEE) and focuses on the strategic implementation of technologies to improve teaching and learning. His specialties include the use of OneNote notebooks and digital inking in the classroom and beyond.
You are here
Last week, I extolled the virtues of Microsoft OneNote, an online note-taking app that can make you the Marie Kondo of online organization. This week, I'm digging deeper with OneNote Class Notebooks for use in teaching and learning. While instructors use the Canvas Learning Management System for credit-bearing academic classes, those engaged in training or extra-curricular learning opportunities may find that OneNote Class Notebooks are the perfect way to help your students learn, retain, and apply the information you cover!
Class Notebooks 101
So what's the difference? A standard OneNote Notebook is designed to organize your work. It allows you to type text; hand write or draw; and add files, images, links, video and audio clips, and more. Then you can move elements around, resize them, or add them to different pages. It's like a digital work scrapbook, except that you and anyone you choose to share it with can access it from any device.
A Class Notebook is like a supercharged Notebook that is designed specifically to organize course content for both instructors and students. Each page works just like a standard OneNote page, but a Class Notebook automates sharing pages with students, providing individual student workspaces that you can monitor, and creating spaces for collaborative work.
Mine, Yours, and Ours
Class Notebooks are created with four main sections: Content Library, Collaboration Space, Student Notebooks, and Teacher Only.
- Content Library: Content library pages can only be created and edited by instructors, but all students can view them and copy them to their student notebook (where they can take notes on it). This is the main section where you will add course content, including lesson or module presentations, handouts, reference guides, class information, etc.
- Teacher Only: This section is for content that only instructors can see. This is a good place to create to-do lists, do lesson planning, document things that happened in class, create messages for co-instructors, or add other content to help you stay organized.
- Collaboration Space: Collaboration pages can be viewed and edited by both instructors and students. It's a great place for interactive, collaborative work. For example, you could ask training participants to list their biggest obstacle or challenge. Or you could assign students to groups and give them access to a Collaboration Space section to do their work.
- Student Workbooks: OneNote will create an individual notebook for each student you add to the Class Notebook. Student will only see their own notebook, but instructors can see and edit all of them. You can add assignments, quizzes, etc. Students can take notes or complete individual work, and instructors can then review/grade it. Students can also copy pages from the Content Library or add new pages of their own.
Take Note: 10 Tips to Know
Onenote Class Notebook 2016
OneNote Class Notebooks are a great way to organize and distribute class content. Here are some tips and tricks to help you get the hang of it.
Onenote Class Notebook Best Practices
- Get Training: OneNote Class Notebooks aren't hard, but they aren't necessarily intuitive to figure out either. On-demand training will help. A lot. Trust me. There are many good videos online. I recommend the training videos from Microsoft or the LinkedIn Learning course, OneNote Class Notebooks for Educators. Whatever learning resource you access, be sure it covers OneNote for Windows 10/Office 365. (OneNote 2016 is significantly different.)
- Lock the Collaboration Space: Unfortunately, people can hijack any platform that allows user-generated content. So monitor the Collaboration Space for inappropriate content. Even better, lock it until you're ready for students to use it, and then relock it when the collaboration period is over. To lock or unlock this section, go to Class Notebook tab > Manage Notebook.
- Students Can Save a Copy After the Class: On the last day of class, have students go to their list of available Class Notebooks, right-click on the title, and select Save a Copy. They can save the entire Notebook (their student Notebook plus the content library) to their Pitt OneDrive account or a personal Microsoft account for reference after the class is over.
- Minimize Your File Size: Depending on how many files you add and how many students you have, you Notebook can get really big really fast! Here are a few ways to keep it under control:
- Save PDF files as 'Minimum Size' and save images in a small web-display size (72 dpi).
- Clear the Recycle Bin every so often of unneeded deleted files and pages.
- Delete student content at the end of the class. Then, you can keep the class content to reuse for another session. (Tip: keep one student notebook for reference.)
- Add Additional Teachers: If there is someone else who can evaluate assignments or successful completion of the training (e.g., for certification purposes), add them as a teacher so they can review student notebooks.
- Distribute Content: Use the Class Notebook > Distribute Page button to copy a page into individual student notebooks. You can add it to all notebooks, select individuals, or to a pre-determined group if you have different categories of students. Distributed a page you didn't mean to? Just click Distribute Page > Delete Page to bulk delete it from student notebooks.
- Provide Audio Feedback: I love giving individual feedback via audio clip instead of typing it all out. Just go to Insert > Audio. It immediately starts recording; just click Stop when you're done. It will add the audio file with a play button and a time/date stamp. Super easy and more personal.
- Add Links Beside File Printouts. When you insert files as a printout, any in-text links don't work. People can click on the icon to open the original file to access them, but I think it's easier to just add a text box with the link right beside that spot in the image.
- Insert File Printouts as a Background. OneNote allows you to annotate and provide feedback directly on the content. But if the image gets moved or you accidentally select the image instead of the annotation, things won't line up correctly. Inserting printouts as a background image locks the element so it cannot be selected or moved. Just insert the file as a printout, and then right-click on the image and select Set Picture as Background.
- Review Student Work: There is no need to navigate to each student notebook to find and review their work. Instead, just click on Review Student Work, pick the appropriate page, and click on each student's name to go right to the page. The list can be sorted by first or last name.
Onenote Class Notebook Examples Of Assignments
Take a page out of the Office 365 book and see how Microsoft OneNote Class Notebooks can enhance your learning and development offerings.
-- By Karen Beaudway, Pitt IT Blogger