What is a Class Notebook?
A OneNote Class Notebook is like a physical notebook, whiteboard and filing cabinet all in one space.
It includes a content library for sharing class materials, a private notebook for each student, an optional teacher-only area, and a Collaboration Space for working together with students and other teachers.
Everyone’s work is saved to the cloud automatically, so many students and teacher/s can access it anytime, anywhere and from any device. Below is a screenshot of an example Notebook. This default Welcome section contains helpful pages about how to manage OneNote. Class Notebooks include a Collaboration Space for students to work together.
The Collaboration space is where group work can be set such as group projects, it’s the section of the Notebook that acts like a “whiteboard”. Each student can edit these pages and add content.
The Content Library resembles a filing cabinet full of class material. Only the lecturer can add and edit content to this section. The content library can be a good place to post assessments, ICAs and other class resources for students to access.
OneNote Class Notebook automatically creates a private workspace for each student.
Like a student exercise book, Notebooks can be collected, marked and returned with feedback to students. Any feedback given to a student is only available to that student in question. In the example below, Martin has completed his work on this assignment and feedback has been given.
A Microsoft Form can be embedded which makes it easy quickly assess and evaluate student learning. This will help to ensure how best to meet the needs of each student.
Distribute pages and sections in Class Notebook
As you start building your content library in OneNote Class Notebook and you have materials that you want the students to annotate on their notepads. There are a couple of different ways that students can achieve this. As the content library is read-only you can either:
- Demonstrate to the students how to copy something from the content library to their notebooks.
- Use the distribute content feature, this feature allows you to push a page to all the students in a notebook at once.
To distribute a worksheet, ensure that the page or section to be copied is currently selected and click on the Class Notebook menu item and select Distribute Page or Distribute New Section.
By clicking Distribute page it will then ask which section of the student’s Notebooks the page should be pushed to. Once the distribution process has been completed to check the distribution, collapse the content library and open one of the test students and open the section where the page should have been copied.
You can also distribute content to individual students instead of the full class. On the Distribute Page, you will see an option that says individual distribution so this will allow you to pre-select only certain students.
This Notebook only includes one student, for a standard cohort a list of all students would be shown, and the specific students can be selected.
The specific student’s Class Notebook can then be checked to ensure that the page has been copied to the desired location.
Setting up a Class Notebook in Blackboard Ultra.
To take advantage of the automatic enrolment, the class notebook must be set up using the built-in Notebook option in the tools section of Blackboard Ultra. Class Notebook spaces that have been set up outside of Blackboard will require students to be added manually by the instructor. To do this staff members will need to sign into their Office 365 accounts.
Staff can choose to create a new class notebook or link to a previously created notebook.
To link to a previously created Notebook click the Manage notebooks and select the notebook to manage and add.
If you have already associated a Class Notebook with this module you will see a message. Creating a new Class Notebook will delete the previous one.
In this example, the Class Notebook (Default options) is to be selected.
The sections that will be made available to students will need to be selected and or added. By default, the Collaboration Space is unlocked.
To create a new Class Notebook, click Create a Class Notebook. Like setting up a Class Notebook in OneNote the various sections will need to be reviewed and actioned. These include:
- Add Notebook Name
- Notebook Overview
- Add Another Teacher
- Add Student Names
- Design Private Spaces
When the Class Notebook is opened it will navigate students away from Blackboard Ultra and open the OneNote notebook in a new browser tab. Users can also then open the Notebook in the full application.
Setting up Class Templates to share with students
A staff member can create a OneNote notebook that can then be shared with students. The students can make a copy of the notebook on their OneDrive and give access to review to their lecturer/s. This can be a good way of ensuring that all students start with the same structure. This will help in ensuring that lecture notes, access to shares resources included in the notebook etc. are made available to all class members. Using this method is very similar to creating a Microsoft Word form or questionnaire document and sharing it with students to allow them to fill it in.
Sharing OneNote Notebooks to allow collaboration between students
If a OneNote notebook is set up via Blackboard Ultra (or Microsoft teams) students will automatically be enrolled and have access to the document. To add additional students or staff to a Blackboard/Teams OneNote class notebook use the Module Tools > OneNote Class Notebook.
For a OneNote Notebook that has been manually set up and configured by a staff member, the share options are slightly different. There are several Share options available:
- Share with People.
- Get a Sharing Link.
- Share with a Meeting.
