Microsoft OneNote

MICROSOFT ONE NOTE

Microsoft OneNote is a digital note-taking app that provides a single place for keeping all of your notes, research, plans, and information – everything you need to remember and manage in your life at home, at work, or at school.
In OneNote, notebooks never run out of paper. Notes are easy to organize, print, and share, and you can search and find important information quickly, even if you forget where you have originally captured it.
Best of all, your notebooks are stored online so you can easily get to them on any of your mobile devices.

Notes Creator

Pedagogical background

Microsoft OneNote can be defined as a digital platform that enable educators to build electronic classroom through creating notebooks to share their training materials effectively with the rest of their classmates. Additionally, it helps teachers to monitor interaction of each student through using various activities in the class such as sharing digital handouts, take notes easily and fast synchronisation on pages.
OneNote Class Notebook Creator is a flexible framework that includes three sections. The first one is student notebooks that allow educators for creating private student notebooks.
The second one is content library which helps educators to upload or updated their course materials and deliver them to the learners and the last one is collaboration space which enables both educators and learners to organize, share and collaborate in one place.
The benefits of using OneNote in Education:

• OneNote is a convenient way for studying and learning on any device anywhere at any time.
• OneNote is an interactive way for accessing to a digital repository of knowledge and information such as academic materials, libraries and assignments or exams.
• OneNote is a collaborative way for encouraging students to study and work as group.
• OneNote helps students to edits their notes together in real time wherever they are in the same class or in different place.
• OneNote enable both students and teachers to exchange their feedback automatically in one place virtually anytime, anywhere.

Assessment
It can be used for summative assessment or for formative assessment to stimulate reflection or critical thinking. This second option is the most interesting in terms of learning and soft skills development. Quizzes can be performed by students by themselves or during class: the tool automatically grades the performance.
The teacher can also prepare feedback (that is shown automatically by the tool) or discuss results in class together with students.
For instance in one of the cases analyzed the teacher gives students a question about a physics problem to be attempted individually. Then the teacher asks students to discuss among peers about their answers to the question in group of 2 or 3.
After few minutes he stops the discussion and he asks students to answer again individually. At the end the teacher shows the right answer.
This use of classroom response system has been undertaken in a large classroom (more than 200 students) to stimulate engagement, self reflection and discussion among peers.

Use cases/examples of usage: (tutorial)

Strenght:

• Creating separate tabs and sub-tabs to help organize.
• The ability to copy and link pages to be shared with other members (even without OneNote access).
• The ability to share Notebooks with groups within the department.
• Allows collaboration.
• Easy notetaking.

Weakness:

• Creating and editing tables could be improved. Would be helpful if rows could be hidden in tables.
• The table’s copy & paste options are cumbersome, often resulting in incorrect cell placement.
• The lack of dynamic elements that could be included in the notes.
• The cloud version of the software – which can be added to Teams sites has limited features and is not as easy to navigate.

People opinion about the tool: https://www.trustradius.com/products/onenote/reviews?qs=pros-and-cons#reviews

Similar Tool: Evernote; Notion; Zoho Notebook; Bear; Notability; GoodNotes.

Technical and operational requirements: A mobile/PC.