Student Feedback on Class Notebooks

There have been a lot of great moments since I started using a OneNote class notebook as my main repository for class notes. I wrote previously about what I was doing differently, and a lot has happened since then. The blog post in which I detail those developments is coming, I promise.

To tide you over, I’ll share this great note that a student wrote in a portfolio reflection before the first quarter reports about our use of OneNote. I think it pretty much sums up why it has totally been worth making a fundamental change to the normal structure of class notes in my classroom. Here’s the student:

For this quarter, Mr.Weinberg made us a cool thing called OneNote. We were able to record the class notes and upload the practice problems for every section online, and share freely. As we got to make our own reviews and share with the whole class, I had more opportunities to go over again with all the tiny details to find any mistakes since I did not want my classmates to learn something incorrect because of me. Therefore, not only my friends could get better understanding, but I could have a more thorough review and have better understanding too. Last time I worked for it, I was working as a group with _______. She organized the information that we learned in class, and I did the practice questions. I used to skip many steps in between the calculation and solving process, but this time I did all the question step by step, even for the questions that looked obvious to me, just to help out my friends’ understanding.

I did feel the need to correct the record with this student that I didn’t actually create OneNote. Aside from that, this is the kind of perfect validation that I’ll take from students any day of the week.