Bringing Additional Eyes to Student Work: 3 Ways to Configure the OneNote Collaboration Space

Thank you, reader, for taking the time to read this.

Awesome opening sentence, right?! Well, because I knew that your eyes would land on my work, I inevitably agonized over that opening sentence, wanting to capture your attention so as to put my best foot forward. So, I wanted to thank you for being here to read this! Would it surprise you to know that I had tried 59 (yes, I’m a high school math teacher) other opening sentences before landing on my final choice?

This idea, that people’s behavior changes when someone else is watching, impacts my teaching in many ways. What I want to explore in this post is one way that I use technology – specifically the onenote collaboration space – to bring additional eyes to student’s work, and in turn, help them elevate their learning.

What is Onenote?
Onenote is a digital note-taking application that allows users to create and organize digital notebooks. As a teacher, I use it to share notes, assignments, and other important elements of class with students. Students use it to interact with class notes and assignments and to complete their own work after I assign it to them.

Teacher View

The default setup is for teachers to be able to see all students. I can easily review student work for every kid in class by simply clicking on their name. See below in figure 1 how I can access each student’s work.

Student View

Students though have a far different OneNote experience and setup. See figure 2. They can see the class content that I post, but they cannot see anyone else’s work Each student has their own private notebook which is isolated from the rest of the class.

Seeing this limitation, I began to explore how to use the collaboration space in onenote to, well, allow the students to collaborate with each other and bring additional eyes to everyone’s work.

The collaboration space in onenote is a truly amazing space. It does two things beautifully well.

1. Any document that is put into the collaboration space can be worked on in real-time by every student in class. (Unless limitations are put on certain students).

2. Students can see each other’s work and interact with it.

Pushing student work into the collaboration brings a fresh energy to any assignment. How do I set it up? I’m glad you asked!

The Instructions

Here are three different methods in which I format the collaboration space depending on the activity and outcome desired.

Method 1: Have all students working on the exact same single document. See figure 3 below.

In this method, a document is placed in the collaboration space. Students are working on the same copy of the document. The steps to set this up are as follows:

Step 1. Create a section in the collaboration space.

Step 2. Insert a document into the first page.

Pros: This is the easiest and quickest way to get students interacting with each other in the collaboration space. You can assign students or groups to complete specific problems, and you ensure that you have a completed document at the end of the process.

Considerations: When all students are working on a single document you have to manage where each student is working and give a dedicated space for work on a question to be completed. Issues with a delay in the syncing of each student’s notebook can lead to work by one student or group being done on top of other work. Also, it has happened before where a student sabotages the collaboration space by deleting work, altering work, or writing something in appropriate. If student sabotage is a problem for you, skip right to method 3!

Method 2: Have all students working on a copy of the same document. See figures 4 and 5 below.

In this method, a document is placed in the collaboration space, but each group is working on a separate copy of it. At the end of class (or during class), these documents can be compiled if wanted. As you can see in figures 4 and 5 below, I had group 1 do question 1, group 2 do question 2, and so on. The steps to set this up are as follows:

Step 1: Create a section in the collaboration space.

Step 2: Create a separate page for each group.

Step 3: Give the same document to each group, and then assign the work as you’d like.

Pros: This ensures that groups are not working on top of one another’s work if you are having issues with devices syncing. Also, students can easily review exactly what other groups did.

Considerations: In this method, you must manually combine work at the end of class if you would like all of the work to show up on a single document.

Method 3: Use “Permissions” to limit groups to editing only their own work. See figure 6.

In this method, a document is placed in the collaboration space and each group is working on a separate copy of it. Because each group has its own section, you can assign student permissions to the sections and stop students from editing another group’s work. Definitely use this method if you are having trouble with students who are exploiting the collaboration nature of the collaboration space through sabotage. The steps to set this up are as follows:

Step 1: Click on the manage notebook button on the top browser tab. See figure 8

Step 2: Click on collaboration space permissions. See figure 9.

Step 3: Click on add section – add a section for each group. See figure 10.

Step 4: Click on edit section button. See figure 11.

Step 5: Select students who you would like to have access to edit the section. See figure 12.

Step 6: Put the document that you would like the students to complete into a page in the group’s section. See figure 6.

Pros: This method prevents other group members from editing other group’s work. This is especially helpful if you are assigning a group project or if you are having problems with students who are sabotaging the collaborative space.

Considerations: This method is more time-intensive to set-up. Also, to create a full answer key, like in method 2 you would have to combine the student work into a single document.

Wrap Up

The onenote collaboration space has provided me with fresh ideas on how to get students working together digitally. It definitely has its limitations – i.e. students can sabotage the collaborative space without permissions set, and some students come to class without laptop styluses or charged computers. But for me, assigning work to be completed in the collaborative space in onenote raises the level of learning in my classroom by keeping eyes on what work is being done by students. There is still much that I can improve on in terms of how I utilize the collaborative space in onenote, but having it in my back pocket has been a huge positive of this year. Please reach out with any onenote or tech questions in general!