Hello and welcome to Mr Tompkins Edtech. Your teacher is going to be using a OneNote Class
Notebook with you this year – which is like a digital exercise book where your teacher
can share resources with you and where you can complete your assignments.
In this video, I’m going to show you how to find and open your OneNote Class Notebook
for the first time, I’ll explain the basic structure of the class notebook and what the
different sections are for, and I’ll show you how to complete your own work in a OneNote
page. This video is part of a series of videos aimed
at students learning to use Teams as their virtual online classroom. I’m going to assume
in this video that you know your way around Teams already, so if that’s not the case,
it’s probably better that you watch some of these other videos first. I’ll put a
series link up here. So where do you find your class notebook for
the first time? Well if you’re using a laptop or PC, and go to your class group in Teams,
you’ll see that it says “class notebook” up here on the tabs along the top. If I tap
on it, its going to show me the class notebook embedded within Teams. Now this is fine if
you just want to take a quick look, but if your teacher is going to be setting you a
lot of work via OneNote this year, it would be better if you install the OneNote app from
the Microsoft Store. Click on the white Microsoft tote bag in the start menu and search and
install OneNote for Windows 10. Now there is also another version of OneNote that comes
with Microsoft Office, but it’s not as good as this one and I do highly recommend that
you use OneNote for Windows 10 instead. Once you have that installed, if you come
back to the class notebook in Teams, you can press this button up here that says “open
in app” (its sometimes hidden at the end here) and your class notebook will be pushed
to the OneNote app and you can open it there instead.
On a mobile device, like an iPad or phone, you’ll want to install the OneNote app from
the app store or playstore. Then if I go to the class group in Teams, you’ll see there
isn’t really room for all the headings across the top, so the link to the class notebook
is listed here under “More”. Tap that, and the class notebook will be pushed straight
to the OneNote app. Now once you’ve pushed the class notebook
to the OneNote app, both on desktop or mobile, then its going to stay open and next time
you want to view it, you can simply open your onenote app and it will be there waiting for
you. Ok, so now you know how to open it, lets take
a look inside and I’ll explain what each section is for.
Now the 3 main sections to your notebook are the “Collaboration Space”, the “Content
Library” and most importantly, the section with your name written on it. Each of these
sections has different rules about who can see it and who can make changes. The “collaboration
space” is a shared area where you, your teacher and all the other students in your
class can edit. So this area is meant for group work. Now the teacher can lock this
area, so you might not be able to use this straight away, but maybe the teacher will
set an assignment at some point later in the term.
The “Content Library” contains all the teachers notes and resources. It’s read
only for the students, so you can look at it but you cant change anything. That means
it’s a great place to look for a clean copy of any resources the teacher has shared.
Lastly, the section with your name on it is for your notes and assignments. You can create
new pages in here or you can edit, delete or write over any pages that the teacher has
distributed to you. Often for an assignment, the teacher will distribute a copy of the
worksheet they want you to complete to your own section here, and you will need to write
on your answers. Now note that your teacher can see everything in here, so its not private
to you. But that means the teacher can mark your work and give you feedback without you
needing to actually send them the files via email or whatever. So actually it works out
pretty handy for everyone. OK, lets try creating a new page - you can
do this in your section with your name on it. Tap add page and you’ll get a new blank
page appear here. Now notice that the folder structure on the left is actually eating up
a third of my screen here, but tapping on this icon here collapses and expands this,
so you can pull it out when you want to navigate around your notebook and close it up when
you are actually working on a page. The “home” ribbon in OneNote is very similar
to word and gives you a bunch of tools to help you type and format text. Unlike word
though, you can tap and start typing pretty much anywhere you like on the page. You’ll
see that it creates these little text envelopes which you can move around or resize. Top left
just above the date here is a space for adding a heading. Whatever you call it here is going
to be what you see in the navigation. As well as text, on the draw ribbon you have loads
of inking tools too, and a great selection of pens, pencils and highlighters,
and my personal favourite - Rainbow pen! Now if
you have a stylus or apple pencil for your iPad then this is going to be fantastic for
writing on, and makes a nice change from typing everything. If you don’t have a stylus,
then you can try zooming in and using your finger to write or draw, which is not quite
so accurate but might do a reasonable enough job, depending on the task.
As well as typing and inking, the “insert” ribbon gives you lots of other things you
can place in your onenote page. If you worked on paper, you can easily take a photo of you
work and use these handy crop tools to stretch out the parallax effect you normally get.
You can also record audio and place that in the page which might be really useful for
learning languages or for reading out your story.
Now your teacher can distribute pages for you to work on here, or you can create your
own. The other thing you can do is copy a page from the teacher’s content library
to your own area. Just find the page you want, right-click or longpress on the page name
in the navigation menu, and copy the page. Go back to your own area, and right-click
and paste it in. You can then annotate the page any way you want, adding your own notes,
thoughts, ideas, or whatever to the document.
I have to say that the search feature in OneNote is truly amazing. Type in any word, and OneNote
will find every occurrence of it either typed, written in digital ink, or even appearing
somewhere in a photo embedded in a page. If English is your second language, you can
use the “translate” feature in the view ribbon to instantly change an entire page
into your home language. You have also got “immersive reader” built into OneNote,
which can help you read the pages much more easily and even get it to read it aloud for
you.
So altogether, OneNote is a really versatile place to do your online work, and over time
its going to fill up with your class notes and assignments and should become a really
valuable digital notebook when you come to revise for your tests.
So that’s the end of this series. I wish you success in your new digital classroom.
If you’ve missed any of the videos in this series, you can check this playlist for all
the others. If you are preparing for GCSE Maths this year, you might like to check out
my Exam paper walkthroughs by following this link below. See you on the next video.