Last year, our school began using OneNote. It is part of our Microsoft Office bundle. One of the tech coordinators started playing with it, found it useful, and soon we were using it as a team.
OneNote is a virtual notebook. It has pages. Those pages can be in sections. You can even create subpages and subsections. Information is easily moved from one section to another, or one notebook to another. Pages can contain text, graphics, audio and other items. Items can be flagged and they show up in your Outlook to-do list. Pages can be as long as you need them to be.
Adding information is easy. No need to create text boxes. Just click anywhere on a page and type. Need a table? Just start typing the top rows contents. Tab each time you want a new column. Hit enter to go down to the next row. A full range of formatting options are available such as bullets, highlighting, strikeout.
You can add your ready made documents, such as Word documents as a link (and it appears as an icon on the page) or as a printout. In the latter case, the entire document appears on the page.
OneNote has a powerful search feature. You can search that notebooks or all of your notebooks. The search feature will even search photos. For example, if you had a photo of a business card, it could find the person’s name in the photo.
Notebooks can be private or shared. If you store them on a server, you can still work locally when you can’t access that server. The notebook will sync with the server the next time it is connected. If the notebook is in Sharepoint, it will even update when you work on it from home.
OneNote is proving to be a powerful tool for collaboration. We can all work on it, and it keeps all our pages synced. At a basic level, think of it for agendas and minutes. However, since more than one person can edit a page at a time, it is good for drafting documents and polishing them. Anything that needs a wiki-like environment could work well in here. However, there is no history, no ability to roll back to an earlier version.
At our school, use of OneNote has grown tremendously this year because my principal saw the power of it and began using it extensively herself. Now departments and committees that meet with her regularly each have their own OneNote notebook.
Here are a few of the ways I’m using OneNote this year.
- I’m a tech integration teacher. This year I set up my lesson plan book as a OneNote notebook. I met with each teacher to plan the semester. I gave each teacher read only access to the notebook because I didn’t want someone to add information for the next class and me not notice it in time. I can work on it from home or school. Access it from any room in the building, and I no longer need to give paper copies or even electronic copies to my principal; she just subscribed to the notebook.
- I created a Tech Help Notebook full of step-by-step directions. For teachers who are comfortable trying new things as long as they have directions, this has worked well and they haven’t needed to wait for me to come help them.
- Budgeting. I created a tab for each department. As they contacted me during the year with requests, I’d click the “Send to OneNote” button in Outlook and then move it to the correct location. As I did research on requests, I’d paste in information from the web and other sources.
- The Tech Coordinators meet weekly and our notebook has headings such as agenda and minutes, computer builds, policies and forms, and tabs for current projects.
All is not perfect, of course. We have found that notebooks need to be kept under 5 MB or they are prone to synchronization problems. OneNote occasionally has caching problems. OneNote is only available for Windows, not in the Mac version of Microsoft Office.
There are many other programs that offer similar functions. For example, Circus Ponies makes Notebook. Evernote is available online.
If you would like a good, quick demo of OneNote, watch it online here.
As soon as I started reading this blog post, I started to think of how it could be used for Agendas and Minutes.
Currently, my grade level simply types up our agenda and minutes in word and we send it out to everyone as an e-mail attachment.
But I can see the true potential of OneNote. I’ve heard of it in the past and have been eager to try it out.
I used to use the free version of Evernote when I was in college a few years back, also.
I used OneNote when I was organizing my “unorganized” ideas for a conference presentation. I love the ease of color-coding and moving information around while brainstorming. It’s a great tool.
This sounds like a wonderful tool and could be very beneficial getting memos out to fellow staff.
Has anyone used Moodle? I work with an education services company in Beijing China called China Study Link (www.chinastudylink.com). We are currently setting up virtual E-pal programs where we connect local students here in China with local students in America and Europe through and electronic pen-pal program. We will be needing to upload video content / assignments, as well as create student groups, etc. I was wondering if anyone had any feedback on this. Thanks!
Cecil, It should work fine. I used it for something similar one time.
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Hi,
i treid to comment on your last blog but then realised you are here now!!
hello,
i have enjoyed finding your blog and i am too working as a tech integration specialist at my school.
anyway what i wanted to find out from you was regarding OneNote.
Please can you tell me how to share a onenote book on the server and make it read-only.
it is the read-only bit that i have failed to master. i just could not find any info about it.
any othet OneNote support materials would be excellent.
I am sure i will be in contact regularly to give you any advice or materials on tech support in school.
Thank you
Patrick
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for reading my blog and following me to this new location.
In answer to your question, the read-only isn’t in One Note. You make that setting where ever you are storing the notebook.
We are using Sharepoint. We created a folder and set permissions as we wanted them (e.g. I can read and write and everyone else can only read.) Then we moved or created the Note Book in there.
The same thing would work on a regular server, be it OS X or Windows. Right click on the folder and then set the properties. On our Windows 2003 server, I am able to give groups permissions which makes it much easier than if I had to set them for every person. For example, I give all IS Faculty read-only permission and then set read-write-modify permission for me.
Does that answer your question?
In terms of One Note materials, I Google for them periodically and check on href=”http://www.scribd.com”>http://www.scribd.com I haven’t found great materials to use with novice users. I also haven’t any fabulous ones or I would share them with you. I do use the What is Word demo from the MS Word site.