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Check out the awesome ‘learning tools’ for OneNote

By January 11, 2018No Comments

I’m on a bit of a OneNote mission at the moment, it’s true. The OneNote Class Notebook add-in is simply superb. I wish the features of OneNote persisted i.e. were the same, across platforms though. The experience you get in Windows simply isn’t the same on Mac or iOS. As you may be aware too, the features in a browser aren’t as deep as you find in the native / local apps either.

One feature that you can add in however that works in (almost) every way is the access to the fantastic Microsoft’s ‘Learning Tools‘. These are a fantastic add-in that you can get working straight away from your browser or by downloading and installing the add-in. The downside is it only works on Windows. On the plus side, many of the features of the Immersive Reader (which forms Microsoft’s Learning Tools) can be replicated through the accessibility features of MacOS and iOS.

The ‘Immersive Reader’ is a great tool that takes anything that has been typed into OneNote and reads it back to you. It helps in lots of ways with that reading too. It can be found easily on the View tab in either OneNote on your Windows device and in the same place on OneNote Online:

It has a whole bunch of features too once you’ve clicked on to it to help learners access the text held within OneNote. You can:

  • have the text read to you at varying speeds and with different voices
  • you can change the colour of the background so that the text is more easily visible
  • you can change the font to one which you find easier to read
  • you can track the words being read on the screen to you
  • you can highlight syllables, nouns, verbs and adjectives automatically to assist with text deconstruction or learning new literacy skills

And this is all there held within the Immersive Reader via the View Tab.

You can download the add-in directly from Microsoft’s One Note site and please note that access to these tools is completely free!

I hope you find this useful and look forward to hearing how you might be using it in the classroom with your learners.

Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson, @ICTEvangelist. Click here to learn more.

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