Using Onenote For School

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We would like to share our experience using OneNote Learning Tools at St George´s College North, a bilingual school in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

After attending Microsoft E2 Educational Exchange 2015 in Seattle and learning the possibilities OneNote Learning Tools had to offer, I had to encourage my learning community to explore the potential for using this technology in variety of ways.Using technology to assist learning helps students in their emotional well being, self-confidence as well as self-esteem.

“Children with learning disabilities face issues when it comes to developing reading, writing, and mathematical skills,” says Mercedes Quarneti, our school’s educational psychologist. “They often require extra time to complete their tasks and individual support during classroom activities. Using the right assistive technology has been life changing for Lola, who has become a confident independent learner, proud of her achievements.”

Examples of onenote notebooksUsing

Visit www.onenote.com in any modern web browser, and then click the purple Sign In button to sign in with your Microsoft account (or your work or school account). There’s nothing to download or install — OneNote for the web is always ready to use! How to update it. Create a Notebook. Just like physical notebooks, OneNote notebooks are a collection of note pages.

Analyzing complex reading text is quite challenging for dyslexic readers. Two years ago, Lola finished her primary school. She had struggled learning to read and write in her early years and was later diagnosed with Dyslexia. Starting secondary school was quite frightening for her and her parents. Lola was wondering how she would be able to cope with the challenge of reading and understanding more difficult, complex texts, as well as the writing demands of secondary school.

At that point, St George’s College North had already launched a “Bring your own device scheme” as part of its learning program. The Learning Centre team and the IT coordinator worked together in order to assist Lola with her learning difficulties. After exploring several options, they decided that using the Immersive Reader in OneNote Learning Tools was the best assistive technology for Lola because it is designed to support students with dyslexia and dysgraphia in the classroom.

She used this tool to access and record written information in a very efficient way. Some dyslexic learners have writing coordination and organizational difficulties which affects their handwriting and causes them to take more time than expected to finish their tasks.

To sum up our experience using the Immersive Reader, Lola has recorded a short video for you to watch:

Using different software, such as the Office Lens app and the OneNote Learning Tools, has allowed several students to have fun while reading from books.

Once students learn how to use the Immersive Reader efficiently, they are able to organize all of their material into different folders, and are able to concentrate on content rather than on the process of learning. As a result, their confidence and self-esteem increased enabling them to record information using the microphone, see and hear written text on screen, improve their typing skills and therefore become more efficient and independent.

Steps to start using the Office Lens immersive reader

If the material you want to read is in hard copy, the first step is to download an app called Office Lens. This app can convert images Word and PowerPoint documents that you can edit.

The text is then copied and pasted into OneNote Learning Tools.

We hope you found this helpful!

This guest post was written for the Microsoft Education Blog by Jennifer Verschoor, Teacher Trainer, St George´s College North, Buenos Aires, Argentina.


Get organized, work efficiently, & sync between all your devices


One of the most important ways to take awesome notes is to create one central place to keep everything. Imagine you were studying at home last night on your desktop computer and today at work a meeting gets canceled and you decide to fit in 10 minutes of study time. You quickly pull up your notes on your smartphone and spend ten minutes mastering memorization. You are efficient. You are awesome.

This can and should be your reality when you are working and going to school.

You have to be able to access your study material at any time, anywhere. There are tons of options to organize your notes, and Microsoft OneNote is my go-to solution. It has powerful built-in tools and wide availability across devices. I’m going to show you some of the ways you can use OneNote for your college study notes.

Set Up OneNote for Study notes

OneNote allows you to organize content in notebooks, sections, and pages. This organization is your friend and allows you to easily locate what you need!

When you have a notebook open you can see the sections (far left below) and pages (to the right) of the notebook at one time. To get set up for your semester or term, here is my recommendation:

  1. Create a section for each course, name it by course name or course code. These will be color-coded to help you see at-a-glance which course you are working on right now.
  2. Look over your syllabus to see how the course is organized. If you will be working through a textbook, create a page for each chapter. If the course is organized by topic, create a page for each topic. Everything you study for each chapter/topic goes on its page. This organization helps you collect your thoughts and keep them together.

With this basic set-up, you are ready to start studying! Want to take your prep work one step further, my productivity partner? Look through your chapters and create a basic outline with the major headings from the chapter. This lets you know what you’ll be covering in each chapter and gives you a skeleton to add notes to.

Take Awesome Notes with OneNote Tags

OneNote’s built-in tags are what make this tool stand apart from others, including 27 built-in tags (at the time of writing). At the top of the OneNote ribbon you should see an area of tags:

Using onenote productively for school

There are a LOT of options, but below are the ones I utilize most often when studying.

Read to make these super powerful? OneNote can search for tags of specific types, building collections of tags within a notebook.

Using Onenote In Schoology

Imagine you have been using flags as you go and at midterm, you want to start studying for your exam. You do a quick tag search for all of the definition tags. This creates a one-page list and automatically copies all of your definitions to this one spot. You also search for the important tag and create a list of the key concepts you’ve noted.

Imagine how much time this will save you!

Syncing across devices

As I mentioned at the top of the page, you need to maximize study time by fitting in short unused blocks of time during your day. Having OneNote on your laptop, phone and tablet mean you can pull up your study notes anywhere g. OneNote is currently available for:

Windows

Android

How To Use Onenote Effectively For School

For

Once you have great organized notes, it is time for Part 3: Turn Your Notes into a Powerful Study Tool. This is where you will really learn how to study for exams in less time.

Read the entire note-taking series to maximize your study time:

Onenote School

  1. Take Awesome Notes with Microsoft OneNote

Try It Yourself: 15-minute Challenge

Using Microsoft Onenote For School

  1. Sign up for a free account or log in with your Microsoft account and check out OneNote.
  2. Set up a section for your current course(s).
  3. Create pages for each lesson or topic.
  4. Start taking some fantastic notes.