How I teach using OneNote
In 2017 I went all in with OneNote. Teaching, planning, meetings — the lot. This article is not an advertisement for OneNote, rather, it is about how I have used OneNote and Class Notebook this year and the triumphs and struggles that came with it.
Planning
To best organise myself this year I created a core notebook containing sections for all of the daily jobs such as planning, to do lists, meeting minutes, quick notes etc.
I set up a weekly plan template and duplicated it for each week of the term. Within this table are all of my classes, playground duties, meetings, and extra curricular commitments. It is essentially the same as my Outlook calendar but it allows me to hyperlink to each of my lessons and I can add additional notes and reminders to myself.
To do lists
The second most important section has been my to do list. Just like the weekly plan section, I created a template then duplicated it for each week. I decided to try using Stephen Covey’s time management matrix to keep on top of things and it has been indispensable.
Meetings
Creating templates for meetings is a huge time saver and also helps keep everyone on topic during meetings.
Class Notebook
I experimented a lot this year with different ways of delivering content through OneNote Class Notebook.
I organised each Class Notebook into the four school terms with an additional section for assessment. The assessment section is used as a digital portfolio and contains drafts, assessment tasks, and creative work that students do throughout the year.
Strategy 1: Lesson planning and distributing content
To keep my lesson planning consistent I developed a planning template. This was distributed to students’ notebooks each lesson and contained all of the resources for the lesson. This meant that students didn’t have to copy down notes thus leaving more time for practising skills and deepening knowledge.
Strategy 2: Lesson planning and distributing content
Taking this a step further, I started adding workbook-like activities within each lesson where students had to fill in the blanks. This worked well to differentiate for lower students as I could spend more time with them while others were able to complete activities independently. It also meant that students who were absent were able to catch up on work they missed as this type of lesson is explicit enough to complete at home.
While it was pleasing that distributing content straight to students’ notebook was a time saver, I was becoming concerned that I wasn’t teaching students how to take effective notes as I was effectively doing a lot of this for them.
Strategy 3: Student note taking
My solution was to create another template, this time for students to copy and use each lesson. After teaching students the Cornell note taking method, it was expected that they used this template to take their notes.
So by the end of the year I was using my lesson template to plan lessons and projected this for students during class while students used their Cornell notes template to take their notes and complete activities. This way students still had access to all lesson resources in the Content Library while creating purposeful notes in their notebooks.
Reflections
I’m still not convinced any single strategy above is best so I will probably continue to use a combination of all three (plus any others I can think of) depending on the lesson and the class. I didn’t use the Collaboration Space a lot this year as it can be annoying with conflicting pages when students try to write in the same space. I will look into using this more effectively next year.
I have loved being able to access and annotate students’ work via my iPad sitting on the couch at home, record audio feedback instead of writing out pages of feedback, capturing notes quickly and easily, and using OneNote across all of my devices.
I have not loved the disparity of features across the different versions of OneNote on each device, syncing issues, font support on different devices, embedding YouTube clips, documents that download from the web browser rather than opening in a new tab, and how long it takes some students to find and open OneNote!
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If you are teaching using OneNote please share your experiences and get in touch by tweeting me @Steef_Reid
