Skip to main content

Feedback to Students in OneNote : A summary

One of our participants here at the Park City Mathematics Institute asked me how we did student feedback at our school; I wrote him an email but thought I'd illustrate it a bit more here:
So, we have a little bit of a unique situation at our school. We use OneNote for almost all student content.  We have a notebook for each course section and then it's specially designed so that the teacher's section is visible but not editable by the students/parents and then each student has a section that only they, their parents and the teacher can edit.  You can see a few of our support videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcVuAxNuOfQ5OdlYDMBFa9bgsavLPCtBs 

So for feedback, I can go in and write (pen-based tablet) any comments I want directly on their work (in real time, collaboratively, during class or at home after they've done their homework).  We also have them do some of their homework as a screencast, so they send me a link with the video of them solving the problem and then I either write or  screencast a response for feedback.  There is a large emphasis in our assessment from our government on communication so this really helps both strengthen and document their progress -- and you have a bunch of exemplars you can then share back with the class since you don't assign the same problem to the all the students :)

Each of the students' section has a special section called "R" ... everything I put in there the students can see but can't edit, so that creates a digital portfolio of all their assessed work. So if they submit an assignment (in OneNote) I mark it and drag it into R to hand it back.  They can see all my comments and their marks but can't change anything although they can create a copy and do corrections.

If I hand back a test there's no more having their work disappear into their backpack; they can always go back and see what they did wrong on major tests.  It is a bit of pain to scan them (tests are the only paper we use) so I don't do it for everything and everyone but for some students (and parents) it's a really important step.   Since parents have read-access to their student's sections, they can see everything their student has done -- for some students, this means I can send a link to their homework page to their parents reminding them that it was due the previous day :) 

OneNote also has a record audio and video function so you can give audio/video feedback; now, I don't use this a lot but the English/Social teachers do when they're giving feedback on student essays and presentations.  They've found that the students are more likely to listen to the video than read the written comments on their academic work and they feel (no proof) that it lessens the emotional impact of receiving criticism when the teacher's voice/face is visible and all the subsequent non-verbal communication is in play. 

So, we're married to Microsoft OneNote for most of our feedback but we've found it to do most everything except time-stamp student submissions.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Desmos, OneNote & Replay

So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it.  They're collected at  https://teacher.desmos.com/  But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough.  It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss.  Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue.  Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page.  From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working.  I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's...
21 comments
Read more

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

Taking a brief break from my "Getting Started with OneNote Class Notebook" series (you can start that one here )... This is a little advanced so if you're not comfortable setting permissions inside of Office365 you may want to avoid this.  Or set up a Class Notebook to play with so that it doesn't affect any existing Class Notebooks.  Yeah, the latter is a good option. One of the great powers of OneNote is that you can do some really neat permissioning of the Section Tabs. When the Notebook is created, of course, it gives you an "open permissions" on the Collaboration Space and student-read-only on the Content Library.  And then each student space is wide open to each individual student. But we've found that occasionally you want to mix up the permissions a little.  For example, you could create a space in a student section for your private notes that the student couldn't see, or maybe you want a tab in the Collaboration Space that students cou...
40 comments
Read more

Making your own font

Slid in amongst all the announcements for Ignite, Microsoft's big conference in September, as a tool that I thought was quite cool.  Not original, since similar things have existed elsewhere & when, but a nice option nevertheless. Microsoft's Font Maker allows you to create your own font using digital ink.  You get all 26 characters, numbers and punctuation (for English languages) on which you draw your font for each character. (For me, it's the first 128 printable characters out of the ASCII table!)  Using your #digitalink pen, you draw out what you want each character to look like. I just quickly wrote out the alphabet as you can see below: You don't have to do it all at once and you can keep working on your Font as you go; it saves as a JSON Project File which means you can send these between collaborators. Once you have your font done, you can adjust the spacing between characters & words to make it look good (it uses a scene from Hamlet -- I...
Post a Comment
Read more