Why OneNote Class Notebook

To be honest I am the least organized person in life and I usually have my mum do my wardrobes, cupboards, anything that needs sorting, putting things in the right place and it usually lasts a week till it's mess again. 

OneNote is kind of my mummy that organizes things for me in a way that I can never mess them up again.  Everything is in a section and labelled and I don't need to make the 'Hey, where is my pancake pan?' call. If you want an advanced level of organization it might take some effort from you but only once because you can move and copy and merge sections from one notebook to another.

In the Collaboration Space you can make sections like Class (whole class collaboration), Team A, Team B, Team C (group collaboration) and even pairs. And the best part is that you can group the students not according to their seating arrangements, as we usually do, but according to their  personality type maybe, or learning style. Determining student's personality type and how it may contribute to group work is something we will discuss during the course.

Content Library is best when organized. If you have Section Groups First Semester, Second Semester within which you would have First Quarter, Second Quarter and in each quarter Week 1, Week 2 you will have a fully structured course. Not to make students confused you might add table of content where everything will be linked to the right section and page. But that is something we'll learn to do later in the course.

Teacher-Only space needs a structure as well. Consider having Lesson plans section group and grading section group. What I have in my Teacher-Only space is Scrap Paper Section group for creating all content that I redistribute elsewhere. Teacher-Only space week in the course is filled with tips, tricks, ideas on how to create your own materials, something you can reuse for years.

You organize Student Notebooks right from the beginning when you are creating the Class Notebook. From then on I wouldn't interfere much, after all it's their private notebook.

I think I have covered some of the best things about the power of OneNote in the image above but this is just a tiny, tiny part of it and you will discover the full force during this course.

I'm a visual learner and that is very obvious. What's less obvious is that I am a social learner as well. I may be an introvert but I learn best with human interaction. But then I also learn by listening, mostly TED Talks. So you see I need more than one type of learning materials.

Let's say I am your student now. What kind of lessons would you prepare for me? Videos, infographics, audio, something involving social interaction. Well, you can prepare all that in OneNote.

If you want to spend little to no effort in preparing materials for me, just add some handwritten notes that I will replay later. Oh, and do use the rainbow ink. Create an activity for me to do with a peer and set up a section for me in the collaboration space, or not. Just assign an activity and a group I work with and I can chat right into OneNote. And do add a player list. I love having some background music while I'm working. Consider embedding Spotify.

However if you do want to spend some time and effort into creating learning materials for me, then you can embed any document, interactive presentation, interactive infographic and even a Minecraft world I can explore and learn from. Now that's a whole new level of teaching.

Using the collaboration space with the whole class is like having them all write on the whiteboard all at the same time. Or having them all work on one project all at the same time. Things that are physically impossible actually work in OneNote.  And not only will you read the notes they are taking but also see who is writing what and when. I mean the exact time. And not to mention the ability to chat when you are using OneNote web app.