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. In the Collaboration Space everyone added to the OneNote Staff Notebook can add to and edit pages.

For example, you might want to save information from an email for an upcoming parent consultation. In your Collaboration Space you can make a new section for parent conferences. Go to the email message in Outlook and save it directly to the notebook page selecting Send to OneNote in the ribbon. 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 Insert menu. Select the meeting and the details are added to the page. Collaborators can work in real time using a variety of content types:

  • Text
  • Digital inking
  • Images
  • Files

Each contributor’s contributions are identified 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.

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?