Mike Tholfsen – The Future of OneNote in Education from Jared DeCamp on Vimeo.
For anyone that oversees the use of technology for eLearning in their school, this video is well worth watching. In it, Mike Tholfsen does a great job going over the current, new and future features of OneNote with a specific focus on how it can be used in education. Furthermore, he hints at new and exciting features being announced in the short term to come.
I highly recommend watching the entire 30 minutes but particularly want to call out the following three features:
- The combination of OneNote, Office Lens and Immersive Reader. This allows for an impressive workflow of taking a photograph of text from a book using Office Lens, sending it to OneNote where the text is scanned by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and then Immersive Reader can have the text highlighted and read back to you. This is huge when it comes to literacy and comprehension, meaning a student can take text from any source and quickly have Immersive Reader breaking down the text for them.
The original text from a book photographed using Office Lens and then scanned by OCR to make the text readable by Immersive Reader.
The same text from the original photograph now being read back by Immersive Reader
- Office Lens and Immersive Reader: The read aloud feature of Immersive Reader has been added to the Office Lens app, meaning a photo can be taken and the text read aloud directly from within the app. Useful for when you don’t want to involve OneNote for a quick read.
- Open Up Resources: A new partnership where curriculum specific resources are prepared and formatted for OneNote and can be pushed directly into the student sections of OneNote like other page content. Additionally, appropriate assessment is pre-built to match the teaching curriculum and these are made in Microsoft Forms and automatically added to your tenant when the resources are added to the Class OneNote NoteBook.
You’ll need to type the links above as they are in an image and not hyperlinks.
Finally, there were two great links for keeping across the developments of OneNote in Education:
- http://aka.ms/OneNoteWhatsNew General overview of latest features in OneNote.
- http://aka.ms/OneNoteMatrix A useful table showing the different features of OneNote and how they work on various Operating Systems and versions