Heavy binders, paper chaos or borrowing the notebook of classmates when students were missing the lesson for some reason - situations that almost all teachers and students know from everyday school life. Without the right working materials, it is difficult to note down the information to be learned in the correct place and to keep everything neatly.

With the OneNote class notebook, notes can now be easily stored, edited and shared digitally. But not only that: in the class notebook, teachers have the possibility to distribute worksheets to the teachers' notebooks and to check assignments directly. In this article, we would like to introduce some of the many useful functions in the Microsoft OneNote class notebook.

All notes in a digital folder

Each educational institution can create a notebook for each grade level and/or class and view the usage rights. Even if the students or teachers device should break, all transcripts are stored safely and will not be lost thanks to automatic synchronisation with OneDrive.

With the class notebook, teachers and students can create their own digital binder for each subject in which they can organise their notes, for example, sorted by subject or date. Students can also subsequently add information or arrange their notes more clearly. In addition, all users have the option of sending their notes to fellow students by e-mail via the sharing function if they have missed lessons, e.g. due to illness.

Interactive teaching with the class notebook

Besides the students individual notebook, the class notebook offers different possibilities for teaching: In the collaboration space, students can work on a joint project from their device. In real time, teachers can also track which learner is working on which information in each area.

OneNote's class notebook brings some additional features for educational institutions, especially for teachers: They can create assignment sheets and distribute them directly to students' class notebooks. Teachers can use OneNote as a whiteboard together with their Surface device and a projector and create whiteboard images that can be displayed directly in students' notebooks and saved in the content library. This eliminates the need for students to copy information on the board and allows more time for interaction.

In addition, the teachers can distribute handouts in the class notebooks and accompany the work on the tasks in real time as well as give hints in the form of comments. The quick overview and also the possibility for teachers to exchange notes with each other, e.g. for substitute lessons, naturally also saves time. Of course, each learner also has his or her own area in the class notebook, which no other learner or teacher can access. There they can make and organise their own notes.

Each educational institution and each teacher can decide according to their own needs which structure the class notebook should have - of course, further areas such as quizzes with forms to query the learning material, timetables or worksheets can be created with OneNote.

With the class notebook, multimedia elements such as audio or video recordings can also be embedded and used interactively. The method case also offers teachers a variety of prepared audiovisual tasks with which you can design lessons or get tips and inspiration.

The class notebook creates a space for teamwork, which can be particularly useful for group work as homework. If the students live further apart and it is more difficult to organise steady meetings in the afternoon, they can work together on projects in OneNote and communicate with each other e.g. via Microsoft Teams, if the assignment allows this.

Would you like to find out more ways to organise digital lessons? Feel free to contact our Education Team at education@surface.love for individual advice.