Next week, the students will be using OneNote notebooks to take notes in science class. The OneNote notebooks will be synced via Microsoft Office 365. I found a terrific video about how one teacher uses the notebooks. You can watch it here.  I attended a session on using OneNote via O365 given by our tech director and an upper school math teacher during our in-house institute we had in March. I got excited about the possibilities then. I used OneNote notebooks with my students a couple of years ago for word study, but there was no syncing at that time. The syncing makes it so much better because like Hapara, I will be able to see the notes they are taking from my screen. (Hapara allows me to look into Gdocs, shared and unshared, as well as Gmail. It is a great tool.)

Speaking of note-taking skills, this week the students are adding VideoNot.es to their Chrome browser. It connects to Google Drive. VideoNot.es lets students watch a video while taking time-stamped notes. The screens are side-by-side so there is no flipping back and forth between Gdoc and video. A student can click on the note and the video will automatically jump to the time of the note. I’ll be using that with my students tomorrow. Like all Gdocs, it can be shared.

As you can probably tell, taking notes is a big focus for us this last quarter of fifth grade. Students will be snipping and using Google Draw to take some visual notes as well. Those can be inserted into their OneNote pages.

We are allowing students to use their notes for the remaining science tests. In this way, we hope they learn how to take good notes and why they are important for their learning.