Make going back to class fun with OneNote

Performing well at school can sometimes be a bit of challenge, but what about for those with learning disabilities like dyslexia?

To assist those with learning disabilities, Microsoft is introducing Learning Tools for OneNote – a toolbar designed specifically to improve reading and writing experiences for all students, including for those who experience learning challenges.

In addition to this nifty add-on (click here for a preview) that will include special text formatting, immersive reading and other features that make classroom activities easier, One Note is the most productive education tool around.

Here are some of our favourite features:

Record a class

Students or educators who want to record a lesson for an absent student, or students who want to record a class to listen to again can do so easily with OneNote. And, if you don’t want to go back and listen to the whole lesson, the notes typed in OneNote while recording will be synced to the exact point in the audio recording. Teachers can also record verbal instructions or feedback for their students so that they no longer need to repeat themselves.

Convert images to text

It’s become the norm to see students pulling out their phones to take a photo of an important slide or notes their teacher has written on the board. With OneNote’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR), photos you take on a Windows Phone are scanned, with any text being captured and converted to editable text in OneNote.

Learn with doodles and sketches

For visual learners, drawings and pictures can be useful learning tools – and OneNote makes it easy to doodle and sketch to your heart’s content. The Draw tab gives you all the drawing tools you need whether you’re creating a random doodle, a graph or an ecological cycle. You can choose to draw directly on your existing notes or pin a Quick Note to them.

Capture your web research easily

When you’re researching online, you can send a whole page or parts of a page directly to OneNote for easy reference. It’s as simple as clicking Ctrl+P and selecting Sent to OneNote. You’ll find all your research saved in Quick Notes, ready for you to put together your lesson or project.

Solve equations easily

Take the stress out of Maths with OneNote. Get help performing tricky calculations by typing in your mathematical expression anywhere on a OneNote page and pressing Enter to see the result. There is also an equation editor to help you construct and enter your Maths equations, or you can even write the equation by hand and see it transformed into text.

Create your own digital textbook

Audio and video create a more engaging learning experience, and OneNote makes it possible for educators to create custom digital textbooks incorporating these elements along with Office documents, pictures and web clips. You can even make it a collaborative project by asking students for their input.

Collaborate and interact virtually

Collaboration is a buzzword of 21st century learning, and the OneNote Class Notebook Creator helps makes this a reality. From offering a collaboration space for classroom projects, to creating a Classroom Library for distributing handouts and assignments and a Student Space for each student, which allows for teacher-student interaction, the virtual environment is changing the nature of the classroom. OneNote Notebook Creator is an online SharePoint apps that is available to educators for free with Office 365.

Never lose work again

You’ll never need to use “The dog ate my homework” as an excuse again. OneNote saves everything for 60 days after you edit or delete it. This means that you can recover anything from the trash and, with version management, you can even go back to an earlier version of a note. This is also a great tool to encourage accountability, as educators can use the Find by Author option to see who did what in a collaborative class assignment.

Making use of technology in the classroom can help to empower teachers and students. If you’re just starting out with OneNote as a teacher or student, browse through the tips on OneNote for Teachers and stay updated with the Microsoft OneNote education blog for more tips.