OneNote Review

There are many teacher uses for the free OneNote program including documenting meeting minutes, collaborating lesson plans with other teachers, developing interactive lessons, and staying organized with calendars, notes, and reminders. Everything that is written in OneNote is automatically saved and may be accessed on other devices through the Cloud. Since I am not at all familiar with this program and there is so much that can be accomplished with it I will just focus my overview on the notebook feature of OneNote.

I experimented with OneNote by creating a notebook for my orchestra class. As can be seen from the screenshots I included different tabs for class notes, practice charts, practice tools, written assignments, and a resource page. This notebook can then be shared with my students and they would have access to everything they might possibly need to succeed in my class. The program is very user friendly and I was able to add text, tables, pictures, and links to videos and online resources with ease. I am very interested in creating interactive lessons for my students to view as well. Usually I have students read and complete theory worksheets but by creating interactive lessons using the notebook feature in OneNote, I would be able to present music theory to my students in an engaging and fun way. They could also use the lessons as a review for a test or I could assign students to read and explore the lessons and links on their own as a homework assignment. I’m also interested in creating a project where students would be able to collaborate in OneNote to complete an assignment. In one of the video tutorials it shows a teacher making marks on a students’ paper and giving the student a grade in OneNote. This is one area I would like to explore more in order to discover how to give individual students’ assignments and how to make comments on their page.

             Since OneNote is capable of accomplishing so many different tasks it will take me a while to explore and learn about all of the different uses. However, once I am more comfortable using the program I can see how it will definitely result in me becoming more organized and help me to develop more engaging lessons and assignments. Here is a link to the teacher resource page http://onenoteforteachers.com

In the screen shot below I show the practice tool tab in which I include a link to an online metronome and a link to a tuner on the second page.    

The screenshot below shows the resource page for my orchestra notebook. It includes a page (with links) for video tutorials, web resources, and sheet music.