Jul 31, 2020 - 3 min read - 1,178 views

A Beginners Guide for OneNote - Create, Share, and Grade your student's work in 1 place!

So I am not going to lie to you. I started this blog and tutorial simply because I saw others asking about OneNote for digital Interactive Notebooks and thought it would be helpful to my digital INB series. I saw that a lot of people LOVED OneNote, but I was honestly not impressed. Being a Google teacher living in a Microsoft district there are a lot of things I do not like but have to learn and adjust to, OneNote is one of those things that I am now glad I didn't give up on. I figured I would learn this app to see what all the hype was about and share out, but probably not use it. After a few days of playing and getting more comfortable with the program, I changed my mind. This is a wonderful tool that has no comparison in Google Apps (yet) and I believe it to be a powerful learning tool for both teachers and students in this new age of digital learning.

Just a warning, in my opinion, there is a steep learning curve to this platform. As a Google girl adjusting back to the MS features was a bit challenging at first. Ultimately I think that watching a few tutorials like mine shown below and just playing with the program will be well worth your time. I am sorry this video is my longest yet, but I go through SOOOO many features that I think it should be worth your time.

Now that you saw the how-to tutorial I am going to break down a few of my big pros and cons of this program. The cons are what made me question its practicality with students and be hesitant to utilize it, but I think the pros may outweigh the cons and I will likely be trying to implement this platform for the upcoming 2020 school year of chaos. Of course, you should decide what will work best for you and your students.

Pros:

Integrated within TEAMS
Allows for grading of student work pages and assignments
Allows students to draw and or type in their work
Can be used as a digital INB
Allows teachers to create and then push out content to classes as needed.
You can push out the same material to multiple classes you have created in TEAMS and do not have to recreate it for each one.
Has the most AMAZING student accommodations for text, reading, and math. Which makes it a great tool for our ESE, ELL, or SWD populations.
I was able to integrate my Virtual Bitmoji Classroom into mine (kind of a hack but it works) so my students will see the same virtual classroom webpage on TEAMS and Canvas.
I have heard that it integrated well with other LMS's but I haven't figured that one out yet.
Has a built-in collaboration space.
Has a neat research feature which is pretty helpful for projects.
You can integrate MS forms for assessments.
You can see students do their work live and assist wherever you want.
I have not found any other method of digital work distribution and student tools that compares.

Cons:

Not intuitive and has a learning curve. It looks really overwhelming on the teacher side at first and was a big reason why I was hesitant to get started.
You cannot see the student version of the notebook unless you can add yourself as a student which I could not do. This for me makes it VERY difficult to determine how it looks for my students and decide if it will be user friendly for them.
Once you push out a content page to students you cannot edit it.
The OneNote platforms look different in the various versions and have slightly different tools (TEAMS, Online, or Windows 10 App Version) which is not ideal for me or my students.
Students will need some help figuring out the tools at first, like I said, not really fully intuitive.

I hope you enjoyed this look into using MS OneNote. There are so many options for creating and sharing content in this new age of education, I hope you find whatever method will work best for you and your students!

Digital Worksheet and Interactive Notebook Conversion Series

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