Month: April 2017

What do we want? Parent access. When do we want it? Now

What is one thing that parents want? They want to see what their students are doing and achieving. For years now they asked their son or daughter what did you do at school today? the same answer is always “nothing” or “not much”.

How good would it be if you could see in real time just what your son or daughter is working on in class, or working on for homework without having to act like a ninja by stealthy seizing their books from their bag.  Even then you risk seeing a generic stamp from the teacher with a good work comment alongside it.

What about hearing some audio feedback from the teacher about why your son or daughter got that achieved when clearly from your eyes it was an excellence. Even more, that audio feedback links to the document in question and those highlights represent audio comments.

I would say this is too good to be true, but wait for it…. OneNote can do this all for you.

With the new updates just released today allowing parents to have access to the students work as well. Some serious questions are now being answered by Microsoft Education.

Teachers can now create links for parents to have view only access to their students work.

Save Time, Template yourself in OneNote

OneNote page templates

 

Why page templates? Obvious we as teachers need to save time where ever possible. I for one was not a fan of detailed lesson plans. This allowed me to have a lesson plan template set up ready for day to day use. This also helped with my own teacher as inquiry and those dreaded unit plans.

 

Open a blank page, use a decorative background already created for you (such as blue wave). Insert some tables to create some organisation and order, Throw in some headings. Add some media, then when you are happy with it click on page templates and hidden down the bottom click on save current page as template. Too easy, you’ve done it.

 

Don’t count out the templates already created for you. Sick of the boring old blank page? Add some colour with some decorative bubbles in the corner or change the page colour.

Got a meeting coming up? Choose the business tab and add in detailed meeting notes. This allows you to add content of a meeting with ease and send it back to everyone later. Making you look super organised.

 

 

 

 

Probably the most useful tool of all is saving the current page as a template. This is and should be a teacher’s best friend. Whether it be rubrics for marking of your favourite math lesson outline, create it once and never worry again. Personalise your content, using colour, ruled lines or even my favourite rainbow background.

 

 

 

 

Save time, be super organised and personalise your work instantly with OneNote Page templates.

 

 

OneNote Collaboration my favourite Space. 

Collaboration Space,

 

As a teacher, I really needed a one stop shop to place everything for my class. That happened to be the OneNote class notebook. So far, I am yet to see anything to that compares. Collaboration, a good 21st century skill, was not easy using OneNote. With Microsoft OneNote being non-linear, students and I found it really hard to control this space. I was fighting a losing battle and needed to fix this fast. I needed a solution. When I thought of this solution it made sense, why not use a table for each student? Quickly I created this table and placed student’s names on the left column and “Your Thoughts…….” next to it. Wow to easy. However, I needed to streamline this approach, creating a table every time seemed like a waste of time.

Page templates, underrates and underutilized tool in OneNote. Simply create a blank table once for your students and save it as a page template. Then anytime you need to collaborate as a class effectively simply go to your collaboration space and use it.

 

I know we love OneNote pages because they are blank canvases. Yet it was so pleasing to see my students get the joy out of watching their fellow class mates express their own opinions and ideas in a uniformed way. The most pleasing aspect of all this was the in-depth discussions that came out of seeing each student place their ideas in one place. It also helped students amplify their voice in the classroom.

 

OneNote Collaboration my favourite Space.