Bringing classrooms into the digital age

Classrooms have evolved a lot over the past few years: chalkboards and floppy disks are out. Digital screens and cloud storage are in.

Children grow up today learning that if they touch a screen on a PC, a smartphone like the Lumia 640, or a tablet like the Surface Pro 3, it invokes a response.

For many, this way of interacting has become the norm and children are using digital technology before they even step foot inside a classroom.

To meet this growing trend, schools are digitizing classrooms. In fact, teachers already use OneNote Class Notebooks to distribute personalized lesson materials and homework, which children can access at any time. Any completed work syncs to OneDrive, ready for marking by the teacher.

In the classroom, devices such as the Surface Pro 3 can be issued to replace the paper workbooks, while at home students can use the same device or their smartphones, such as the Lumia 532, to complete assessments for the next day.

The usage of OneNote Class Notebooks is growing all the time, with three times as many OneNote Class Notebooks being created last month than the previous two months combined.

In order to reach even more people, OneNote Staff Notebook for Education is an Office 365 app that’s been created to cultivate and manage educator collaboration at the district and school level. This app opens up all the benefits of OneNote to an entire school or district rather than just individual classes.

Also millions of students around the world are now eligible for free Office via Office 365 Education from their school.

To see if you’re eligible, enter your school email address at one of the following links:

• For students: Go to com/getoffice365 and enter a school-provided email address.
• For teachers: Go to com/teachers and enter your school-provided email address.

Once signed up for Office 365 Education, you get:

• The latest version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access and Publisher installed on up to five PCs or Macs and up to five mobile devices like iPad, Android and Windows tablets.
• 1TB of storage on OneDrive that you can use to store and share all your documents across all your devices.
• Office Online for in-browser editing, collaboration and co-authoring.

The great thing about Office 365 is that, for example, you can start writing an essay at your school desk on a PC and during the bus journey home, finish it on your Lumia 830, making the most out of your travel time and reducing the amount of time at home doing homework.

Are you in a school and taking advantage of these services? Let us know below.