We are kicking off a short series of posts dedicated to one tool. It’s one of my favorite tools and one that I would be using non-stop if I were still teaching. 

OneNote 

OneNote, in short, is a digital notebook. Think back to when you were a kid, or your older kids were in school, and everyone had to have a Trapper Keeper Binder with the Five-Star Notebook that you would click in. Each Trapper Keeper would have a combination of colorful tabs, folders and 3-holed punched paper. This is the digital version of that, only better!  

Check out what Microsoft has to say about OneNote Notebook.   

What is OneNote? 

Today’s post is going to focus on OneNote. Next week we will talk about the Class Notebook, and we will round out the following week giving examples of how OneNote can be used for teaching, next steps for training and so forth. 

In keeping with the opening paragraph, the way OneNote works is first you create a Notebook (Your Binder). Once that notebook is created then you create sections (this would be your colorful tabs) and then in each section you have your pages (3-hole punched paper, college ruled, of course). Then you can fill in the pages with anything you want. When you copy stuff from Chrome or Edge into OneNote, it tracks the source for you, like a Bibliography. You can post videos, pictures, and (if you have a touch screen) you can handwrite notes inside of it. It’s just like if you were handwriting all your notes inside a trapper keeper, only better. 

Now say you want to work with someone on something that is in your notebook. Well, you can share with others and collaborate with them within the notebook at the same time on separate computers across the world! You couldn’t do that with your Trapper Keeper. Nor could you dictate to that old Trapper Keeper. You read that last sentence right, you can actually dictate to your OneNote Notebook. It’s part of an add-on which the district is making sure that all students have access to. Also, you have an easy link to download it from your computer.  

Learning Tools (A.K.A. Immersive Reader) 

Learning Tools are the crème de la crème of OneNote. Within OneNote, you have the ability to dictate, leave yourself voice messages, and read it back to you. OneNote will translate your spoken words into another language including French, German, and Spanish right in the notebook. There are a number of free voices you can download if you are not a fan of the stock voices. If that wasn’t enough, the immersive reader read text, has a picture dictionary, breaks words out by syllables, and lists the parts of speech. 

If you want to work on a OneNote on another device, you can do that too! Be warned though. Not all features of the desktop version are available in the app or O365 or Apple Watch (yup it works on the Apple Watch for all of you cool tech people). Hopefully, they will be soon! Check out the latest updates from Mike Tholfsen below:

I guess the question now is, where is this amazing tool? Well, you need to click on the start menu or ask Cortana to open OneNote for you and the world can be yours!