Moving on up with OneNote

Last year I meet with some members of my department and the social sciences department about using OneNote for their classes. I had been playing around with Microsoft OneNote for my junior classes and had found it user friendly, versatile and really useful for getting different types of information across. You can easily embed word documents, PowerPoint or Office Mix presentations, and even just record a voice over or video into the pages. Microsoft Onenote makes a lot of sense to me and how we organise our Science topics at our school.

It became a department goal for the Science Department in 2015 that each ‘subject’ developed one OneNote for either a class or a topic throughout the year. So far, I have been really impressed with what we have come up with.

For Chemistry, we have started at Level 2. Neither B.H or I were overly happy with the text book for the internals last year, so we have had a crack at making our own for the 3 internal assessments, while still using a purchased workbook for the externally assessed standards.

The Chem book is still a little text book like – mostly text with some areas for students to work on, a few diagrams and some links to youtube clips. But it has been easy to put together and my colleague (with all due respect to his effort) is less confident using technology but has been going great guns.

Our biggest issues was getting the sharing permissions sorted – we are still having issues between work e-mail and the microsoft e-mail that we had to set up to log onto the devices. But we have plugged away and have got most of the syncing issues sorted now.

Biology has really taken OneNote and run with it, and I am super impressed with what they have achieved. The Biology Onenote is full of interactive activities and also has a page for each student to submit work and gain feedback.

So for us, Microsoft OneNote has slotted in really well, has been easy to use and is making a difference for our students. Users are gaining confidence and are trying new things which is putting a more personal spin on how they are using it. We are not a BYOD school but more and more senior students are bringing their own devices to class and being able to store the OneNotes in the cloud is making student access very easy via their own devices or the school laptop pods.

Out next step is to get class book creator set up – There is some PD happening on the 18th of March, which will also help us get Sites up and running for each of our subjects so we can share documents between ourselves and out students more easily.

All in all, some awesome progress on the OneNote front 🙂