How OnNote saved my life as a Bilingual Teacher

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This year the CBE created an Office 365 environment for all the teachers and students. Different applications started to be available during the year: OneDrive, Sway and OneNote amongst others. As a Surface user, I already knew and used OneNote for personal purposes and soon I started to play around with it and discovered a myriad of possibilities for my lessons.
I started to use it and soon it became an essential in my class, especially since I do not have a textbook for Mathematics or Spanish. From all the technological tools that I have used in my career, this one has been the most transforming. These are the main 3 reasons why I love it:



  • You can create a Class Notebook for each of your classes. In each class you have, by default, a "Teacher Only Section",  a " Collaboration " section and a "Content" area ( shared with the students in that classroom), and a Notebook for every student. Each student Section has already these sections "Handouts", "Classnotes", "Homework" and "Quizes". You can customize them as you like.  


  • You can create and distribute assignments to all the students or the students you select. You do not need to share with them every document, whatever you create in a shareable folder within a classroom, they can see it. This is faster than when you use google drive. Just create an assignment and distribute... et voila!To review their work, you just go to "review" and all the assignments are already there. This saves so much time!

  • You can show your lessons on the smartboard and write on them, everything saves automatically and students can review class notes easily. You do not need to share, it is already in the class notebook. So when they ask...what did you do yesterday in class? no problem...everything is there for them to see. This is my favourite feature since I teach Mathematics in Spanish. First, because we do not have a textbook , and it makes it so much easier for parents to see what is going on in class. I literally had no questions this year as to what is what we are learning in Math.
Sample of Teacher's Notes

Students' answers using the smartboard

Students can access OneNote from any computer. They can also insert files or record audio .


One Note Classroom made my life much easier this year because it facilitates instruction, communication, class work, editing students' work, communication with families and lessons recycling for future years.
In the next post I will share some tricks to set up classroom accounts. If you have other suggestions on how to use OneNote in the classroom please join the One Note group on "Yammer"

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