I recently saw this great blog post from Steve Brophy who is the Director of ICT & eLearning at Ivanhoe Grammar in Melbourne and do encourage you to read the full thing here:
Utilising the power of OneNote and Surface to develop visual thinking skills
The phrase that caught my attention was Steve’s description of OneNote as an application that has a “low floor, high ceiling” meaning the barriers to entry are minimal and that almost anyone can understand how to use it quite quickly, and yet the possibilities are almost limitless, hence the high ceiling for usage. This struck me as a very helpful way to describe the power of OneNote and Steve illustrated his point with the following image:
Steve added that using a Surface device heightens the benefits of OneNote for students:
Being able to zoom in and out through the touch capacity of the Surface Pro 4 allows students to change perspective and delve into different components of their thinking. This thinking can then be easily shared with classmates through OneNote’s presentation mode and it is in this endless canvas approach that students can see their ideas not as separate discrete elements but as a narrative that represents their current thinking.
I first met Steve in February 2016 when visiting schools in Melbourne, Australia and after spending the afternoon at Ivanhoe I stayed on for my first experience of a TeachMeet. This inspired me to host TeachMeets at St Andrew’s College throughout 2016. I’ve found Steve to be an excellent educator and leader and highly recommend you check out his blogs here and follow him on Twitter here.
