Get the most out of OneNote Staff Notebooks

  • 15 minutes

Remember, you can use OneNote Staff Notebook to:

  • Work together with colleagues
  • Distribute important materials school-wide
  • Give personalized, professional feedback to staff

Work with colleagues

A OneNote Staff Notebook is great for sharing notes with colleagues. You can work together on group activities and collaborate on various pages using the Collaboration Space.

Screenshot of the using the Collaboration Space screen.

For example, you might want to save information from an email for an upcoming parent consultation. In your Collaboration Space, make a new section for parent conferences. Open the email in Outlook. Select the Apps icon, then choose OneNote from the menu. A task pane appears where you can pick the notebook and section you'd like to save the email to—for example, your Collaboration Space's parent conferences section. Select Save, and the email is added to the page for your team to reference and discuss. Find more details at Send emails and meetings from Outlook to OneNote.

Screenshot of the send email from Outlook to OneNote option.

Select the Collaboration Space and the correct page. Everyone with access to the Staff Notebook can now see the message and make comments.

The Collaboration Space is also useful for taking group notes. OneNote can import meeting details from Outlook including those who attended, its time, date, and agenda. From the notebook page where you want to add the details, select Meeting Details from the Home tab. Select the meeting and the details are added to the page.

Screenshot of the meeting details option in the OneNote home tab.

Collaborators can work in real time using a variety of content types:

  • Text
  • Digital inking
  • Images
  • Files

Each person's work is tagged with their initials.

As the school year progresses, you may need to modify a Staff Notebook. If you set up the notebook in Microsoft Teams, you can make the changes in Teams using the Manage Notebooks button.

Note

Selecting Manage notebooks opens your Staff Notebook settings in a web browser.

Screenshot of the manage notebooks option in the OneNote class notebook tab.

Activity

Now that you created your Staff Notebook, create a workflow for a meeting.

  • Create a new section called department meetings
  • Create a page for your meeting
  • Use the meeting details feature to connect the page to an Outlook calendar event

Application

Individual sections in a Staff Notebook allow:

  • Educators to document their goals
  • Educators to keep track of their professional development
  • Educators to share lesson plans with administrators
  • Administrators to provide feedback on lesson plans and classroom observations

Reflection

  • Being able to work on the same page at the same time with inking, typing, and multimedia is powerful. When would this be most powerful for you and your colleagues?
  • Would distributing school and staff materials via OneNote lessen the volume of email in your inbox?
  • What are the practical benefits of being able to distribute key documentation to staff digitally through OneNote?