Remote Learning Series: 5 tips to rock OneNote
Updated: Sep 7, 2021
A lot of teachers around the world are transitioning to a remote learning environment due to the COVI-19 outbreak.
The eTwinz have created a series focus on remote learning where they will share five scenarios of remote learning.
Welcome to the eleventh blog of this series: Five tips to rock OneNote
OneNote is a digital notebook that automatically saves and syncs your notes as you work.
You can do many things with OneNote: Type information in your notebook or insert it from other apps and web pages, take handwritten notes or draw your ideas, use highlighting and tags for easy follow-up, share notebooks to collaborate with other or access your notebooks from any device and more!
OneNote has changed the way we teach. Thank to some OneNote features such as the digital inking we went full paperless in our class.
OneNote is a great tool for remote learning. It allows you to review the work that students do at home easily. Also, you can even check their work live and give them feedback.
Many studies show that the most powerful feedback is the one that it is given before the task is completed
We have put together five tips to use OneNote in a remote learning setting:
1. Organize your OneNote
The way you organize your materials is more important now than ever. Students need to find the materials easily.
A good setting for your OneNote will reduce the amount of frustration in your students, and the amount of emails and questions you get every day.
There are different settings that educators use to organize their content in OneNote:
By subject: If you organize your OneNote by subjects you will need to create a section for each subject and then pages for units or different topics.
By week: Many teachers decide to organize their content by weeks creating a section for each week of the month and pages for each subject or class that holds the content from that week.
By units or projects: This setting is used by teachers that apply a cross-curricular learning approach such as project-based learning or a problem-based learning.
Also, having a schedule section in the content library of your OneNote may help your students to know what is coming and to organize their time. Here is an example of how we organize our schedule:
2. Integration with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams assignments has a great integration with OneNote EDU: You can distribute pages from the assignments tab to OneNote EDU.
Watch this video from Microsoft EDU and the eTwinz to learn more about this wonderful integration.
This integration allows teachers to access to some unique features of Microsoft Teams such as Insights while using OneNote.
¨With Class Insights in Microsoft Teams, educators can access analytics data on student engagement and performance. Class Insights collects student activity in Teams, like grades, assignment turn-in, communication activity, and file collaboration, creating an analytics dashboard surfacing actionable data visuals¨
Picture from Mike Tholfsen Youtube video on Microsoft Insights
Also, by having your OneNote assignments in Microsoft Teams you have access to the Microsoft Teams grading system which allows teachers to export data to different grading systems, use rubrics, give feedback among many other features that will help you to manage your assignments in your remote learning setting.
3. Use OneNote as your whiteboard
We always use our OneNote as a whiteboard for our Microsoft Teams meetings with our students. We like this better than using the whiteboard integration that Microsoft Teams has because in this way all the notes we take during our live classes are saved to our Content Library for our students to check after the call.
Also, we have a OneNote page where students can find a link to the recordings of the meetings and a link to the OneNote page where the notes from those lessons are:
4. Share your students´ work live
You can share your screen during your Microsoft Teams Meeting with your students and complete the assignment that you are working on directly in OneNote and it will save automatically.
Also, you can share the work of your students while they are working along with you during your live lesson in Microsoft Teams. You just need to go to their OneNote Class Notebook. This is particularly useful to share examples of students work and enhance the participation of students in your lesson.
5. OneNote Games
We have a section in our One Note Collaboration Space for our students to play different games. This section gives them the opportunity to keep playing with their friends from home. Here there are two examples of the games that we have in that section of our collaboration space.
Students are often in a Microsoft Teams meeting while they play together.