One of the most powerful and useful tools within Office 365 is OneNote. OneNote is s a computer program for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. It gathers users’ notes (handwritten or typed), drawings, screen clippings and audio commentaries. It is a tool that can be used by students, teachers, principals for a multitude of purposes. Whilst OneNote is bundled with the subscription based Office 365, it is also available as a free standalone download for all devices (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android & Windows Phone) from www.onenote.com.
Learning Tools
I recently came across this 4-minute tutorial on how to enhance OneNote even further by downloading the Learning Tools add-in for OneNote.
When you download the add-in and open the Learning Tools you get the following options:
You get the Immersive Reader and the Dictate tool.
 |
 |
Using the inbuilt tools you can re-arrange the text by manipulating the font size, the line spacing, the background colours and much more. This is all done within the tool and doesn’t require any additional knowledge on your part.
By so doing teachers can represent text for students who have dyslexia.
By clicking on the bookshelf students can obtain visual quest to help them with their grammar.
Students can listen back to the text and the Learning Tools will read it back to them.
There are countless ways in which this tool can assist learners and we would welcome hearing how you or colleagues are using this powerful add-in, so please share your stories.
Students can also speak directly into OneNote using the Dictate tool, once they are connected to the internet.
They can dictate into OneNote in a number of languages as shown above. It is a pity they can’t, as yet dictate as Gaeilge, but hopefully that will come in time.
When a student, or a teacher, clicks on dictate they can begin to record their notes
OneNote will capture their words in text. This is a really nice tool and it is extremely accurate. Again we would love to hear how you or colleagues are using this tool to support student learning.