Fast forward to this year and I was the one presenting at the Training Academy. Alongside Alan Crawford, we showed the impact that OneNote Class Notebook is driving for teachers, students, and classrooms everywhere.

1.      Making organisation easier

As a planner, my OneNote contains my daily schedule and learning intentions/success criteria for each lesson. I have my layout set as a template so when I add a new page, it’s all done for me. To this, I add any resource files or weblinks that I need.

Because it works on any device, I can check my planner on my phone before school, on my desktop in school, or even during the lesson on my Surface as I move round the class. My teacher OneNote also has the school events calendar, department timetable, policy documents, and teaching resources. Basically everything I need across the whole year is at my fingertips wherever and whenever I need it, meaning I can work smarter and be more productive.

2.      Increasing student collaboration

Class Notebook is the tool I use to share all resources with my pupils no matter what type. It keeps all the resources organised so that students can easily find them. These are all stored in the content library and thus are accessible to students so they can take control of their learning but not editable for them.

Students are encouraged to download the OneNote app on their devices so they can access these resources outside of school. It’s now easy for a student to find the right resources they need to complete homework.

They are also given a personal section which can only be viewed by the teacher and themselves. In there, I distribute notes. They can annotate and highlight key words using the drawing tools tab.

All biology essays are completed in OneNote as assignments in Teams. This makes it easier for me to check how students are progressing with an essay. When completed, I can easily add a screenshot of the marking scheme and give them written or audio feedback.

3.      Distributing and reviewing work

Distributing work to students is quick and easy in Class Notebook. Select the Distribute Page button and it gets sent out to each student’s own personal notebook section. Quick and simple and saves all those trips to the photocopier.

To review work, I select Review Student Work and I can go through each student’s page to mark and give feedback.

4.      Encouraging student voice

I also use OneNote as my school whiteboard. I use this to record the teacher notes we refer to in class. This ensures that all students can revisit the class notes. If they are absent, it’s easier for them to catch up before they return to class.

PowerPoint files are inserted as printouts so I can annotate over to add additional information.  I can screenshot an image from the web for labelling.  Also, using the Insert Picture feature I can take a picture of a page from the textbook to explain something or a question as we work through the answers together.

I often insert pictures of pupil work and they often lead the learning. They then talk through their work and share with the rest of the class. Student voice is so important in my class. With OneNote, they have the opportunity to share their written work digitally with everyone and explain their thinking behind it.

5.      Improving maths comprehension

My students fully embrace Maths Tools in OneNote. I don’t use it often in my classroom, but they tell me it is a very useful tool.

If they are working on an equation they can use the Lasso button in the Draw tab to select the equation and see the steps to solve it. This is useful when they need some help to see how to solve the equation and the teacher is not available to explain, such as working at home.

It even insert a forms quiz for the students based on that equation. So they are not only seeing how to solve the problem, and then apply this to various questions generated in the form. This is also a great teacher time saver as the students are self-marking.

6.      Improving student and teacher communication

I really like the variety of ways that feedback can be added to OneNote. I type feedback, write it in digital ink, but also can insert audio feedback too. If work requires an extended response it is far quicker for me to record what I have to say and insert it into the OneNote.

This means face-to-face feedback with the students doesn’t stop. I can add this type of feedback at a time when the students aren’t in class. They can listen to it many times if needed as it’s saved in their notebooks. Also, for pupils who find reading feedback a more difficult task, audio feedback is far more effective for them, even for short comments.

7.      Improving accessibility

Immersive Reader is available to teachers and students across so many of Microsoft’s tools for the classroom. It ensures all pupils can access the learning content and has a huge impact.

In the View tab, select immersive reader. A new window will appear for the text on the page. Here, you can change the page colour, text spacing, or highlight grammar specifics. But what amazes people the most is the read aloud feature. Not only can this read out text, but it can translate it into another language and read it out!

Helping students reach their potential

For the last four years I have been using OneNote Class Notebook in my classroom and each year my use of it evolves and changes. I have seen first-hand how using OneNote can help teachers and students. It saves me time so I can focus on my students. It allows me to make my classroom more accessible than ever before. For students, it’s helped them gain vital digital skills, improved their collaboration, communication, and empowered them to increase their learning potential.

Find out more

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Organise your classroom with OneNote

About the author

Sarah Clark is a Teacher of Science and Biology at Queen Anne High School in Fife. She is an MIE Fellow Scotland and a OneNote Avenger – she even has the cape to prove it! She has been teaching for 16 years and is passionate about integrating technology in the classroom to help enhance learning and enable students to gain digital skills.

The post 7 ways to unleash students learning potential with OneNote appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

I used to spend a large amount of my time either reading or scribing for students in class for exams and assignments. There were a large number of students who needed help and not enough staff to go around. As the Head of Support for Learning, I would have to prioritise support which meant that many students would have to go without.

When I did attempt to incorporate technology, it was often difficult. Costly site licences would mean that my department budget was gone before I had even begun. During high pressured assessments, I could have as many as four different applications running at the same time. The potential for imminent catastrophe was always astronomical. As soon as I got one piece working, another would crash on me. It’s very difficult to maintain a calm exterior when everyone (student, invigilator, and exam officer) is looking for you to fix it instantaneously.

Discovering Microsoft’s tools

In 2015, I attended a CALL Scotland conference and had a chat with their director, telling him my woes. I’ll never forget when he turned to me and said “Have you ever tried OneNote? It’s like a digital notebook.”

I had noticed that purple logo near Word before but had never actually clicked on it. I went home and it felt like opening Pandora’s box. There were so many features. I started researching and found another new discovery, Class Notebook. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming. You mean I can create a notebook for each of my students that I can have access to at any time, on any device? No more rummaging through school bags for crumpled notes that the students can’t read anyway.

Accessible by default

I started introducing Class Notebook to all my classes. Suddenly, I had the gift of time. Once the structure of the notebook was completed for students, spending time organising during lessons went out the window.

Class Notebook meant that I could spend time working with the students on the literacy intervention that really mattered. Little did I know what was going to happen next. More research online led to following the Microsoft Education Product Manager, Mike Tholfsen on social media. I noticed he was posting about a OneNote add-in called Learning Tools. It was at that point that I also discovered about the MIE Expert Programme.

Previously, I had used various Text to Speech software applications with limited success. They did the job but were clunky and often prone to crash. Worst of all, they were just another thing to worry about.

As part of Learning Tools, there’s something called Immersive Reader. As soon as I pressed its logo I was hooked. I couldn’t quite believe the options available to my students. Page colours could be instantaneously changed (no more need for coloured overlays; the students kept losing them anyway), line focus meant that my students could remove distractions and focus on one, three or five lines at time (no more reading rulers; again they just lost them).

Picture dictionary showed students an image of a word to support comprehension. It used BoardMaker symbols that I had previously spent monotonously printing, cutting, and laminating for hours.

As well as working with students with learning differences, we also had a significant number of English as an additional language learners. With learning tools, we were able to translate a single word or a whole page of text with one click. Last time I checked, Immersive Reader can translate text into 63 different languages and that list continues to grow.

In addition to Immersive Reader was the option to dictate directly into OneNote using, yes you guessed it, Dictate. I had tried various computer dictation programs, but they required both a studio quality microphone and the patience of a saint to train it to recognise a coherent sentence. Dictate was already there, integrated into OneNote, and it was incredibly accurate. It could even understand my Glaswegian accent!

Students could now access support for reading and writing at any time, in any place, with any device and, more importantly, without asking. The next step was to take these empowering and transformational tools out of the Support for Learning classroom and into the wider school.

Improving student outcomes

I decided to make it my life’s mission to share Learning Tools. Not just with my students and close colleagues, but everyone. I started running Digital Drop-In training sessions to demonstrate the power of Learning Tools and how other educators could start incorporating them into their own classroom settings.

My big goal was to incorporate Immersive Reader into the exam setting. This would remove the large amount of human readers required for each exam. We did face one problem – Immersive Reader is a cloud-based service and in public exams, the internet must be turned off.

Luckily our exam papers are all PDFs. By opening them in Microsoft Edge, you can use the Read Aloud function without an internet connection.

We started deploying this in exams and in a very short time we saw the transformational effect:

• Students were able to complete classwork, tests, and exams on their own but still access all the support they required to achieve their full potential.
• At the last set of exams, over 70 hours of staff time was saved on not deploying human readers.
• Costly site licences, from £500 to over £2000 a year were no longer necessary.

Creating a new legacy

Learning about the transformational power of Learning Tools and growing as an educator would not have been possible without joining the Microsoft Educator Community. There I started my journey to become an MIE Expert.

Doing this has taught me so many different things about the incredible features in the Microsoft tools. I would need another 10 posts to tell you them all!

I’ve also attended several MIE Expert events at London Paddington and even the new flagship Microsoft Store where I have been able to present my story. It was at an MIEE event that I first discovered FlipGrid. The student voice app has had a completely disruptive influence on my classroom and I mean that in the most positive of ways!

The work I have been doing with my students was recently rewarded after I won a global FlipGrid competition to attend E2 Education Exchange in Sydney, Australia in March 2020!

Trust me, becoming an MIE and starting your journey towards MIE Expert will change your life.

Looking back, I can still not fully comprehend what a transformational impact these tools have had on my students, colleagues, and myself both professionally and personally. Learning tools such as Immersive Reader and Dictate have completely changed the lives of my students. Becoming a Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) Expert and joining the Microsoft Education PLN has completely changed mine!

Find out more

Join the Microsoft Educator Community today.

Build an inclusive classroom

About the author

Chris is an Additional Support Needs Teacher from Lanark Grammar School in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been an MIE (Microsoft Innovative Educator) Expert since August 2017. He is hugely passionate about the role technology plays in empowering young people and breaking down any barriers they may face in their learning, especially those with additional support needs.

The post Empower students, colleagues, and everyone with Microsoft’s Learning Tools appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.