Hello,
We are entering into using Teams as our remote teaching platform and we have been trying to set up our curriculum in OneNote and have pupils deposit work there. Our initial thoughts were that we could use OneNote to hold Word and pdf files for pupils to edit as well as using the Onenote pages. We are going to bring pupils attention to their tasks via Assignments and then grade them in this Team's module.
Over the course of this last week, we have encountered a number of obstacles to this idea which are summarised below.
I was wondering if we have understood the capabilities of the system correctly and I wanted to reach out to anyone who is more familar with Teams, Assignments, Grades and OneNote than us.
Another afternoon’s investigation has revealed the following:
- Embedding Word documents in Onenote and then setting the page as an assignment severs any link with the original document (unless you paste it in as a link in which case everyone will be editing the same original). Because of this, it appears that when you go to edit it will only be editable if you download it and then open it as a Word document. (The odd thing is that if you use the Teams mobile app you can open the Word documents in the browser version, I haven’t been able to test what happens if you are a student and use the app version to compete the Word document from the Onenote app.) The severing also means that when you come to mark it, should the pupils have the technical skills to download, amend and reupload, you have to download it and open it in Word, review it and then renavigate your way to Teams to mark and comment. A nonsense.
- Therefore, if you want to use Word as your template then you will need to assign it from the Assignments in Teams straight off. (This is the conclusion Emma et al have already come to!) You need to make sure it is a .docx file too otherwise you are into the same problems of having to download and then upload an amended file. When the .docx file comes back you can edit this in Teams with the score and comments visible on the rhs. The beauty of this is that it is all there, the downside is that it then becomes a separate entity, as you say, separated from the rest of the pages of your work in OneNote.
- The ideal solution therefore is to only use Onenote to create content that you want pupils to edit. If you need to send them information then that can be embedded it in Onenote as a file or a picture for them to reference.
- You can, I see, link to a specific Onenote page from the Teams Assignment. This would have the added benefit of being able to set it up with a forward date which you can’t do from Onenote. It would appear that you don’t need to ‘Connect’ the Onenote file via the connectors either for this to work, so it would appear this is only relevant if you want to create assighments from OneNote but with this ‘reverse’ capability, would you need to. Possibly a red herring from me but this has changed since I first started investigating it – apologies)
- (Excel does maintain links with the original file apparently so changes both ways from Onenote and in Excel will be mirrored. How this effect the hand in and marking I didn’t discover as I suspect it isn’t widely used at the LS.)
Some things that appear to fall out of this:
- If we want to use Onenote as a repository for work then we need to move towards setting up the pages in Onenote to accept text (as I suspect very few people will have touch screen computers or drawing pads to add writing) and therefore only adding Word documents, etc as supporting information.
- However, all the information per student is collected in the Grades module in Teams so Word documents could be used here as they will be stored. We could put a ‘picture’ of the original document in the Onenote page as a reminder of what work the pupils did. This might be more appropriate for longer writing tasks.
- In maths we use a lot of work sheets which mostly come via pdf formats. Without enormous efforts from teachers to reset these as Onenote pages I don’t see an alternative to using these documents. Two thoughts here. Paste a picture and upload a file into Onenote so pupils have the option to print out or type over/write over the picture. With the printing out they would then need to photograph or scan and resubmit to the OneNote page. (It would be technically easier to upload to the Teams Assignment but it means marking it is hard because you would need to download a copy then open it for each pupil.
Many thanks,
Hencloud
