The OneNote team continues their series of blogs highlighting how the Class Notebooks benefit students and educators. Nikkie Laing, associate principal from the Opaheke School in New Zealand, guest wrote a blog post for OneNote.
In it, she wrote about the use of OneNote Class Notebook being used in the primary school classrooms. For Opaheke, students and teachers build up “modeling” books where they collaborate their ideas, lessons, and assignments all into a ‘scrapbook’ for everyone to access at later times. These notebooks are commonly separated into three core subjects: reading, writing, and math. Every lesson begins with looking back at the previous day’s work, then moving forward towards their next goal based on the class’ understanding.
But the physical notebooks are a flawed tool for the students of Opaheke School. If a student needed to search for something in one of the notebooks, it just simply wasn’t available for others to use at the time.
With the introduction of OneNote Class Notebooks, the physical form of these modeling notebooks is completely irrelevant. Students can access the lessons all at once. Now when a student misses a day of school or needs to use the notebook to look back on a lesson, they are able to do so without impeding others’ access to all of the content within. Those same ideas, lessons, and assignments are accessible at all times, to every student and teacher, on multiple devices. With the ability to use and organize thoughts together in real time, students grow a sense of shared responsibility to learning through OneNote.
As an upgrade to the modeling books, once stored in boxes with stacks of papers and notes, Class Notebooks make it possible for each class to create more transparent teaching. Allowing students to understand their learning much more by viewing what has been done before, where they are, and what is to come in the future lessons.
OneNote Class Notebooks are essentially able to remove the process of passing out papers, hunting for resources, and eliminate barriers that originally left students behind in the classroom. For Miss Laing, this means that the teachers can do more of what they are best at, and that is actually teaching.
