Reflections on OneNote

OneNote looks to be an incredibly useful tool for creating, sharing and collaborating online - both with fellow teachers and with students. It’s a way to organize everything you need for exploration, preparation, teaching, and followup all in one place. It can be used to teach in a very engaging way using text, pictures, audio, and video and can even be used to quiz and test on the material.

OneNote is cross-platform and can be synced to multiple devices, making it something that’s easy to access from almost anywhere. While it does seem there would be quite a learning curve to figuring out all OneNote has to offer, there are a number of tutorial videos to help you interactively see how things work.

Our school has been moving things into the Google Suite over the last couple of years, including more encouragement to use Google Classroom this year. Because of my unique teaching situation and having students spread out through 13 different schools, that hasn’t really been an option for me since all users need to have the same domain name in their email address. I think OneNote would allow me to connect with all of my students in one place.

I created an example of how I could use OneNote to give my students an opportunity to explore something coming up in one of our weekly rehearsals in advance of the rehearsal itself. In the example below, I include a couple of links to information about Cut Time and some specific of examples of rhythms we’re going to work on in a new piece of music that will be handed out at rehearsal. This gives students a chance to come to rehearsal with some background knowledge and a preview of some of the rhythms we’ll be working on.

Click here to see the full Pre-Rehearsal Cut Time Page