Our Journey with OneNote Class Notebook...
Our journey began last year when ten teachers piloted Class Notebook at our high school. Many of our teachers, especially in the math department, had a love of OneNote already. Class Notebook made that love stronger. OneNote Class Notebook allows the teacher to create a OneNote Notebook and add students to it so they can have a personal workspace. The teacher can distribute material to the students, review work, and everyone can ink. Over the summer, I facilitated an online "Summer Tech Challenge" in which teachers were invited to strengthen their Class Notebook skills or begin the journey with class notebook. Twenty teachers accepted the challenge. At this point in the school year, we have twenty teachers using Class Notebook plus our principal. Another teacher is interested in joining the journey during the second quarter. These teachers are in the science, math, foreign language, english, social studies, and theology departments. OneNote Class Notebook is for ALL.
Along the way, we have learned the following:
- Creating a Teacher Notebook for each course you teach is extremely beneficial. This helps the teacher get organized and makes distributing material to the class notebook super easy.
- The Class Notebook Add-in is essential. This extra tab in OneNote makes makes distributing and reviewing work quick and easy.
- A teacher can distribute a section group to students and then distribute chapters to that section group.
(section group)
(tabs within section Chapter 1 section group)
- When training students on the class notebook, we are making it a priority to train them to NOT rename pages teachers distribute nor put "extra" material in a section distributed by the teacher. This helps when reviewing work. We tell them "if it's not in the right place, it won't be seen by the teacher" because the teacher is not likely to hunt for the work.
- Sending feedback is so worth it. The OneNote people are incredible and so fast in their replies. I skyped with someone today who is helping us figure out something. Thank you, OneNote! May your purple cape always fly!
