Digital Literacy 101: OneNote
As I noted in a recent post outlining our 1:1 initiative, all 7th grade students and teachers are participating in a trimester-long Digital Literacy course based on these four themes:
- Information Management and Research
- Digital Citizenship
- Communication and Collaboration in a Global World
- Creativity, Critical Thinking, and Design
To begin the course, the first of our nine lessons focused on the most fundamental of tasks: utilizting OneNote for notetaking. For those new to OneNote, here’s a short video introduction (best viewed full-screen):
As you can see from the video, OneNote is similar to traditional binders/spiral notebooks but with several key advantages for students:
- Notes may be typed and/or handwritten
- Page elements (e.g. notes, images, etc) can easily be repositioned and resized
- Numerous options for pens, highlighters, and page lines
- Copy/paste from the Web includes the URL
- Notes can be searched whether written or typed
- All resources for all classes are in one location
Having a better tool does not mean that students will automatically become better at taking notes. However, the potential to makes notes truly multi-modal with color, images, audio, and even video is certainly a powerful motivator for helping students understand the importance of developing this essential skill.
September 4th, 2008 at 11:42 am
The unit looks great, and I’m interested in how students are using these tools. I have been playing with Evernote and starting to really like it for my own notetaking.
If you are ever looking for more resources on this topic, I have some related stuff here: http://couros.wikispaces.com/Media+Literacy … see also the sidebar.
All the best!
September 8th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Hey Patrick,
Here is another potential resource for the class:
http://www.nortellearnit.org/technology/
The videos are short and really well done…the “History of the Internet” is a great sample to watch to get a glimpse of what this is all about. Don’t know if this fits in with your curriculum, but just wanted to throw it out there.
Matt
May 26th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
[...] first lesson in the Trimester 1 Digital Literacy course was devoted to using OneNote as an electronic [...]