Thursday 29 October 2020

Using OneNote as my planner and digital textbook

This year I have moved to using OneNote as my teacher planner, after inspiration from some other teachers in the Facebook NI Teachers Collaborate group. Rather than use one notebook as my planner, I am using the Teacher section in the class notebook for each of my classes in MS Teams. Here's some screenshots from my Year 9 notebook. This is a page from the Content Library which the pupils can look at but not edit. I put useful links, videos and texts here.
This is what I use as my planner. I adapted a PPT template from the aforementioned Facebook group then exported the slide as a JPEG. I import it to the page I have labelled as week beginning and rightclicking on the JPEG, I can set it as the page background which then allows me to type and write over it.
I have created a section in the Teacher Only section called Unit Content. I then can create pages within this, with hyperlinks to the documents and PPTs I intend to use which I have saved in One Drive.
Here are some screenshots from my A level notebook. Again, the Content Library is a superb form of digital textbook for the pupils. Here is an index list of the sections I have included so far, and an example of the page with useful websites.
I can include texts with exercises
I can easily paste the link to an assignment in Teams or just post it to one of the channels.
Another section in the Content Library for A level is the film we study at AS. You can see the pages I have added already in Column 2.
Here is the oral section in the Content Library, again the second column shows the different pages I have added to help the pupils work independently.
Finally, here is my Teacher Only section with the planner, SEN, Admin and Topics section, which I use in the same way as the Year 9 one detailed above. The Planner section has a planner page per week as well as the schemes of work and scheme of assessment for quick reference.
I genuinely cannot recommend using OneNote as a planner enough. It has made teaching so much easier, particularly this year as we hotdesk from classroom to classroom. Let me know if you decide to try it

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