OneNote Classroom for e-portfolio assessments

Since 2017 Jose Bilbao has been using OneNote for Classrooms in its Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) course to successfully deploy individual tutorial workbooks. This course typically consists of around 60 students. During each tutorial, students use the workbook to record all their work, including numerical solutions to LCA problems, data tables, references, modelling results from software, etc. The goal is to develop an e-portfolio during the course. Half of the tutorials are assessed and make up a total of 15% of the student’s final grade. Tutors are able to access the student workbooks at any stage to drop feedback comments and help guide their learning in the right direction. 

The administration at the beginning of the course is as simple as creating a new class notebook. OneNote asks for the email of each student, and once that information is uploaded, the system automatically creates one notebook per student with a predetermined number of sections, which can also be configured as part of the process (for this course three sections are used: Tutorials, Deliverable 1, and Deliverable 2). Each student’s notebook is only accessible by the student, Jose and the Tutors. 

Tutors usually take an average of the tutorial time to give live feedback to students and also spend around 30 minutes after the tutorial to open each student’s workbook, provide feedback commentary and the mark. The tutors use a simple rubric of 0, 1, 2 (0 – not attempted, 1 – attempted but incomplete or with mistakes, 2 – attempted and complete) in order to mark the student’s work. 

Pros

• OneNote for Classrooms is easy to use and set up, it takes less than 20 minutes 
• Live collaboration for students;
• Centralized location for both students and teachers;
• Cloud-based solution means it can be accessed anywhere, from any device ;
• Familiar user interface, similar to most Microsoft Office tools;
• OneNote allows many types of inputs, including text, photos, videos, sound, e-ink, etc.

Cons

• Grading rubric cannot be easily integrated into OneNote itself;
• Does not integrate with Moodle, meaning some manually grade transposing is required.

The best place to get started is via their website here. 

Microsoft provides an easy to use interactive training presentation here. There is more thorough training available here. 

You can use your UNSW Office 365 account in order to get started straight away. You will be guided through the steps of creating your first class notebook, adding students and collaborating with other teachers. 

• Make sure you have the full class list with emails, before starting the Class Notebook process as you are required to insert a list of all your student’s emails;

• Think about the sections of the Class Notebook (the default options might not be the best for you) and the sections for each student’s Notebook (you can change this after creating the Notebook though, but it can become messy);

• Inform your students that you will be using OneNote with plenty of anticipation. Including information in the course outline is a good idea;  

• Get yourself and your tutors familiarized with OneNote beforehand so you can spend some time showing the students how to use it.

Below are a series of screenshots from a previous course (student names have been blurred) showing examples of how students build their e-portfolio, how teachers apply their grading as well as provide feedback: