What began as an email to staff at my school has become something that I look forward to each week.  I love to investigate new resources for those that teach and for those not necessarily in a classroom.  I hope that you can find things here that you can use!

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Many years ago, I worked in the graphic arts industry and we kept a portfolio of our past projects on a table in the lobby.  This allowed our customers to see things that we had created – t-shirts, car designs, business signs and more.  It was a way for us to display what we had done both for our reference and for our customers.  We were proud of our work and we wanted it to be seen. 

 

In this digital world of education, what if we encouraged students to keep a running “Digital Portfolio” from Kindergarten to Graduation! 

 

Here in CCSD, we have a tool available to us that would be great for creating a Digital Portfolio…OneNote!  It’s obviously compatible with Office products since it is one.  It’s easy to drag & drop items.  It’s easy to import items.  You can write on it using a touch screen!  It’s compatible with Canvas! 

 

Imagine a Kindergarten student creating a OneNote and adding to it every year until they graduate.  What a great collection of work they will have created!  Documents, presentations, images, videos, all of these things can be saved in OneNote.  The ability to add Sections (for school years) and Page (for subjects) would allow a student to sort and catalog tons of work. 

 

Creating a OneNote is easy!!  Simply go to Office365, select OneNote from the options, and create “New.”

 

Once you’ve created the OneNote, you can start adding sections and pages. 

 

Think about how valuable this could be for PLC’s!  Students are collecting data (work samples) as they go from grade to grade.  Students can easily access prior tasks and projects and improve upon them AND share them with their teachers.

          ELA:  Alright class, today, we’re going to pull up an essay that you wrote two years ago.  How can we improve on what you wrote?  How have your opinions about the topic changed?

          SS/Science:  Let’s pull up last year’s Fair project, how can we take this to the next level?

 

As you can tell, I’m a big fan of OneNote!  I think it’s incredibly underused for the amount of options that it provides.