OneNote for Students: Top 10 Tools for Learning and Teaching
Take a look at some of the best methods you can utilise in OneNote to reach not only your own but your students potentials!
1. Organising
OneNote is versatile tool which adapts to anyone’s note-taking preferences. You can organise digital notebooks by Sections and Pages in a way that makes sense to you. Some like to organise information based on time; Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, etc. Others like to organise by content; Chapter 1, Chapter 2. Chapter 3, etc. Others just throw everything together in a pile with little or no organisation at all, no matter your preference One Note adapts to you.
2. Accessing, collaborating, and sharing content
Note-taking no longer needs to be a solitary experience. With technologies like OneNote, teachers can help students learn long after class time is over. Notes remain 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
Often 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, 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. Presenting wirelessly
This method for teaching in face-to-face environments allows for free movement around the room, providing a more effective and responsive learning environment for both teacher and student.
5. Exploring with digital ink
Learning can be messy and OneNote provides the free-form tools to help you 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 artefacts 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, accuracy 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. Unleashing learning across devices
In a world where bringing your own device is becoming increasingly common 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. You can use your mobile phone to add pictures on-the-fly in near real-time and notes are automatically synced to all the devices which you 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.
7. Allowing flexible teaching styles
There are many things to manage in the classroom and OneNote lets you as the teacher decide upon the best method to use for a given situation. OneNote allows for easy review of older material and provides multiple methods for formative feedback that it is most effective.
Adding new content is just as easy and you can individualise instruction based upon any student’s needs and interests. Flipped-classroom type resources can be organised by scope and sequence to meet individual needs.
8. Searching and tagging
Getting notes into OneNote is one thing, but the true value of note-taking is being able to retrieve that information when and wherever 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 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 hand-write 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 individualise 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! Your possibilities are endless!
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