OneNote Class Notebook is free for education users as part of Office 365, it has some additional functionality which isn’t available in standard OneNote files. In this blog post, I want to focus on the additional learning tools available in this version. There is also a video guide for this post below.
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How do I get Class Notebooks?
Class Notebooks can be created in a many ways (depending on how your school decides to use Office 365). Class Notebooks can be created from the Class Notebook App, Microsoft Teams or inside SharePoint or OneDrive.
Creating a “Class” in Microsoft Teams will automatically create a Class Notebook for the group.
How are Class Notebooks different to OneNote Notebooks?
Class Notebooks have a section for each student. Each student can see their own section, the teacher resources and the collaboration area. They can’t see other student sections. Logged in as a teacher, you have access to all the student sections.
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How do I send distribute an assignment to the students?
Assignments, worksheets or any other hand-outs can be copied into each student’s own section. To distribute a page, the teacher must:
- 1. Create a new page
- 2. Populate the page with what you would like to be sent out to the student (e.g. write an essay on…..)
- 3. In the “Class Notebook” option in the ribbon, select “Distribute Section”
- 4. Select where you would like the page to be sent
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How do I review student work?
Class Notebook has a great tool to make it simple to find student work. In the ribbon select “Review Student Work” from the Class Notebook.
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From here, you can select a page and switch between students for quick access to their work.
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Immersive reader
This option is available under the “View” tab.
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The immersive reader provides the student with a tool to clearly show text on the page without other distractions (images, formatting, etc). In addition to sharpening the student focus on the text, the tool provides some options to:
- Emphasise syllables, nouns, verbs and adjectives.
- High contrast themes
- Focus on lines or sections of the text
- Read out the text
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This is a learning tool that has some good research behind it which suggests that it can be used to improve reading and writing comprehension.
What about formal assignments and homework?
OneNote Class Notebook is a great tool for non-formal work hand-outs. With Microsoft Teams, it can be enhanced to provide formal assignments which can be handed out to students, collected in and graded. We will look at that in the next blog/video post.
Need help setting up Microsoft Teams?
I work for Cloud Design Box and we provide teacher training workshops, support, MIS integration, apps and many other services for Office 365. You can contact us via the website or by email. I hope you have found this blog and video post useful!