Skip to main content

When OneNote (& the Class Tools) makes your life easier...

So it happened that the day I was going to give a test, I couldn't, so I needed to quickly get together some review questions for the students to work on. (Sorry, I wasn't ready to start the next unit with them, and besides, it was the first class after the long Easter weekend... shoot me, I'm a nice guy.)
Into my archive files I go...
I found a test from back in 2003 that was highly algebraic -- just the skills they needed for the test and nothing else.  No "thinking" questions, as it were.  We'd spent the last week or so on word problems and questions that try to stretch and make connections.  I just wanted to makes sure their algebraic skills were strong & sound.
Here's where life gets easy, thanks to OneNote ClassNotebook.  

I used the PRINT -> Send to OneNote 2016 option in Word and it sent a printout of the test to my OneNote teacher section (called Content Library).

With the page in the Content Library (in the right spot! I like that things stay organized in OneNote) I went up to the the CLASS NOTEBOOK ribbon.
Then, I used the ClassNotebook Tool DISTRIBUTE PAGE (to multiple notebooks) and sent the "13 Practice Test" page to all the students in all three of my sections all at once.  Boom!  Handing out complete.  
Then, I say to the kids, I don't have a solutions page, but you have the period to work on the test and then I will go through and clip out good models for solutions for each of the questions from your work.  Away they went to work... crowd-sourcing their own solutions.

And so after school, I opened up the first class section's Notebook and used the REVIEW STUDENT WORK button to look at each student's work.  I opened up a second copy of the OneNote notebook and created a new page in my Teacher Section for the Answers... and copied (I use WINDOWS-SHIFT-S to do a quick screen capture to the clipboard) & pasted the good model solutions from the left notebook to the right notebook.

Using the list of students in Review Student Work was great, because I could flip between student solutions quickly and even students who would self-describe as "less able" I could find good models of solutions from their work, so no one was left out.  (I didn't include their names when I copied/pasted because I wasn't asking them to share their work -- I needed to keep it anonymous).

So now that I had my solution set, I used the ClassNotebook Tool to again Distribute to all the studetns in all three sections.  I counted; it took seven clicks -- the menu ribbon, the button, the three classes, the section to where it went and COPY.    To distribute the entire solution set to three classes, about 60 kids... no paper, no muss, no fuss, no lost copies, no email problems, no permission issues.  Just there & done.
And it's in the EXACT place you want the solutions, right after the actual test I distributed earlier.  

Not only did it save me time, it gave value to the students' work.  Yes, I could have had them post to Yammer or to the Collaboration Space, but this also gave me a chance to go through each students work and highlight any errors I may have noticed.  All in all, something I would do again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

Taking a brief break from my "Getting Started with OneNote Class Notebook" series (you can start that one here )... This is a little advanced so if you're not comfortable setting permissions inside of Office365 you may want to avoid this.  Or set up a Class Notebook to play with so that it doesn't affect any existing Class Notebooks.  Yeah, the latter is a good option. One of the great powers of OneNote is that you can do some really neat permissioning of the Section Tabs. When the Notebook is created, of course, it gives you an "open permissions" on the Collaboration Space and student-read-only on the Content Library.  And then each student space is wide open to each individual student. But we've found that occasionally you want to mix up the permissions a little.  For example, you could create a space in a student section for your private notes that the student couldn't see, or maybe you want a tab in the Collaboration Space that students cou

Desmos, OneNote & Replay

So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it.  They're collected at  https://teacher.desmos.com/  But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough.  It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss.  Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue.  Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page.  From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working.  I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's refr

Escape Room / BreakOut in OneNote

[[Part 2 of this article is here: Link] ] So when I was visiting  Anna in Edinburgh  during March Break, she showed me how she used Password-Protected OneNote sections within the OneNote ClassNotebook to help students check their work -- she set the password to the correct answer, so they knew they had it right when the Section opened up. I figured I could use this for Math Review, so I set aside a couple of hours (turned out to be 3 hours but a fair chunk of that was solution-time) the other night to put an Exam Review together for my Grade 10 Mathematics course.  I pulled together as many multiple choice questions and short answer questions on the topics as I could Google and tried to balance each Section with a mix of topics and then threw in a couple of pop-culture questions, too.  The students worked on the problems in each section and used the answers as passwords to unlock the next section until they got to the Prize section. Result?  Near total continual engagement