Research Using OneNote

One of my third grade teachers and I collaborate at the end of each school year on a Native Americans research project. We usually direct students toward relevant print and digital resources. Then they take notes on a graphic organizer and create a Power Point presentation to share the information with their classmates. But this year, we decided to have students complete the project in OneNote! Although we use OneNote regularly, this was the first time we used it with students.

We first prepared the OneNote notebook. Each of the tabs in the notebook was the name of a different Native American tribe. Within each tab, we created three pages. The first page was for taking notes. We learned that we could insert the same graphic organizer that we have always used and that students could type their information straight into the boxes in OneNote. The second page contained a document with resources about the Native American tribe. The third page was set up so that students could add a link to the Sway they created after researching. We decided to have students use Sway instead of Power Point this year.

When students came to the media center to research, they accessed the notebook through an email sent from their teacher. Once everyone was busy, a few students asked, "Where is the paper?" We explained that there was no paper graphic organizer and again showed them how to type what they learned on the note taking page. We also explained that everyone in the group could type at the same time. Some students figured out how to have two windows open next to each other so that they could read a website and take notes at the same time without switching back and forth between two windows.

Some students took longer than others to log in. Some students accidentally deleted their graphic organizer.  And some students moved the resources file so far off the page they couldn't find it. But my colleague and I were very excited about what our students accomplished in our 45 minutes together. We think that training students on OneNote as soon as school starts next year will allow them to navigate their notebooks proficiently in no time. We look forward to learning more about OneNote's features to help us create better notebooks and to use OneNote more effectively with students.