Tag, You're It!

Tags in OneNote

As announced by the OneNote team, Windows 10 and Mac OneNote users now have the ability to create and use custom tags. The update includes the ability to:

·        Create new custom tags

·        Search for custom tags

·        Have roaming tags across devices

·        Gather existing tags in a notebook and save as your own

This is an exciting feature for both teachers and students as tags can be used to create to-do lists, identify important information and can now be customised to suit your own needs.

Here are my top three ways of utilising tags in the classroom:

To Do Tags:

Using the Content Library in OneNote Class Notebook is a great way to create and share lessons with students. 'To do' tags in OneNote provide students with a clear and logical way to work through tasks that have multiple steps. When the teacher creates a lesson in OneNote, they can place a 'to do' tag at the beginning of each instruction or step, allowing the student to tick it off once they have completed the task. A clear way for students to track their progress through a task or assignment. Creating rubrics in OneNote can also become an effortless process using tables and 'to do' tags. Simply create a table with the desired amount of rows and columns for your rubric then insert a 'to do' tag into each section. When marking a presentation or project, tick the 'to do' tag to show which criteria the project meets.  

Feedback:

Effective feedback specifically tells students what they are doing well and offers guidance to move their learning forward. It can come from self-assessment, peer assessment or directly from the teacher to help students develop an awareness of their progress along the learning pathway. One of my favourite ways of referring to feedback and feedforward in a primary setting is the idea of 'two stars and a wish' or 'two medals and a mission'. This is where tags become a fantastic learning tool to assist in 'coding' the type of feedback given. Simply click the tag you want and type, ink or audio record your feedback on the page. My personal favourite is the star tag to show positives and the lightbulb to show next steps. This system also works well for peer feedback as students can work on the specificity of their feedback by ensuring they have two relevant 'stars' and a next step - 'lightbulb'.

Teacher Registration:

An innovative way I have seen teachers make technology work for them is by creating custom tags in OneNote to tag evidence towards each of the teaching standards. With this recently released feature in OneNote Windows 10 and OneNote Mac, you can create a customised tag to code all of your evidence that relates to a particular teaching standard. You can simply click anywhere on the page or in the page's title to add the tag, then when you want to see all of your evidence, search for the name of your custom tag in the search bar. This is very time efficient as instead of copying and pasting pages and having multiple versions of the same page you can simply have a direct link to the page through tags.

For a detailed explanation on how to use custom tags see - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Custom-tags-available-soon-in-OneNote/ba-p/302898