Learning Tools for OneNote

This is the first instalment of what will be a series of blogs about OneNote for teachers and students.

My name is Peter Kettenis. I work as an Office 365 business consultant for Cavero in the Netherlands.

One of my focus areas is training and user adoption. As a trainer I often come across similar challenges schoolteachers might run into. Therefore I decided to share some of the things I've learned as an O365 trainer in this series of blogs.

 In this blog I'll focus on a nice little Add-In called Learning Tools for OneNote.

The Learning Tools Add-In was developed to improve the reading experience for students. The Add-In can help increase the readability of almost any text by, among many other things, taking away visual distractions, reading the text out loud, highlighting the words being read and using optimized fonts.

Therefore it can be of great help to students with, for instance, dyslexia. It could also be really helpful to non-native English speakers learning the language.

 An Add-In is a small piece of software that you can install that adds a small bit of functionality to, in this case, OneNote.

The Learning Tools Add-In is available as a free download from the Microsoft website.

 It is also important to understand the different versions of OneNote that are available.

First we have OneNote Online. This is part of any Office 365 environment, and it is available for free for teachers and students. All you need to use OneNote online is a web browser.

Then there are two versions of OneNote that can be installed on your computer.

If you are running Windows 10, chances are you already have OneNote installed. This version is called OneNote for Windows 10, sometimes simply referred to as OneNote.

Last we have the OneNote that comes with Office. This version of OneNote usually has a 'year' included in the name, Like OneNote 2013 or in our case OneNote 2016.

 In this case I'll be using OneNote 2016 combined with the Learning Tools Add-In.

At the risk of making this even more confusing, different versions of OneNote can all do different things.

I don’t know why Microsoft chose to implement it in this way, but I am hopeful that, as the product grows more mature, more and more features will be integrated in all the different versions. 

Once you have downloaded the Add-In, follow the installation instructions and open OneNote 2016. 

You will now see a new Tab in the Ribbon called Learning Tools.

As you can see, the Learning Tools Add-In includes two new tools called Immersive Reader and Dictate. 

Let's start with the Immersive Reader.

Immersive Reader can help children read and understand text.

"I've created a new page in my Notebook and I have added a piece of text from one of my favorite movies. Let's see what the Immersive Reader can do to help children read and understand this text. To start the Immersive Reader simply click on the Learning Tools tab in the Ribbon. Here you select the Immersive Reader Icon. To start the Immersive Reader, click on the Play button at the bottom of the page. The Immersive Reader will now read the text for you and highlight the words being read. In the top right corner you'll see 3 icons that can enhance the reading experience even more. When you click on the Text modifying button (the double A button) you have all the tools available to make the text more readable. You can change the text size, spacing and font to your preference. You can use the themes to further increase the readability of the text. To help students better understand the grammar of the text, you can use the Learning Tools grammar aid. Click on the Books icon to open the menu. Here you can highlight Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives, or have Learning Tools chop words up into Syllables. The third menu, the little speaker icon, lets you change the speed and the voice that is used to read the text."

Another cool feature of Learning Tools is its ability to work together with the Office Lens app on your phone.

Below is a picture taken with my iPhone using the Office Lens app. I've used Office Lens in combination with Office 365 to directly add the image to a new page in my OneNote notebook. 

Now watch what happens when I click on the Immersive Reader tool in OneNote.

"Since Office Lens is able to recognise the text in the image, and the Learning Tool is able to read the text, I can take basically take any text, digital or not, and have Learning Tools help me read and understand it."

Learning tools also has a Dictate feature. This feature will allow you to quickly capture your ideas, prepare classes etc.

Although this sounds like a great feature to have in OneNote, you have to speak extremely cleary. Maybe I might need to use another microphone, or it has trouble understanding English spoken with my Dutch accent.

It works, but the text will need editing before it will be useful.

Hopefully this is something the developers of Learning Tools will improve on in the future. 

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. I'll try to do my best to respond as soon as I can. 

For more information or help:

https://onenote.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/topics/127731-learning-tools