OneNote, the Surface and Moodle

I recently (through my company, Remote-Learner) became involved in a partnership project with Microsoft Open Technologies. This project has the ambitious goal of providing tighter integration of a variety of new Microsoft products with Moodle. I'm very excited about this.

The products we are focusing on initially include OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook Calendar and the various pieces these integrations will support, such as the Office 365 applications and Azure Active Directory.

For me, this meant getting myself reacquainted with Microsoft technology and systems. I chose to buy a new Surface Pro 3 running Windows 8.

The Surface is an interesting device. From my perspective, it’s a tablet that tries to be a laptop when you want it to be. But in my experience so far, I like it far better as a tablet. And for me, the killer app is OneNote on the Surface.

If you are not familiar with OneNote (I wasn't), it has been around for a lot longer than you think - since at least 2003. If you're familiar with Evernote, its a very similar application. To put it simply, it is your collection of notebooks, available to you on all your devices. You organize each notebook into sections, and add pages to the sections. Pages can include your created notes, media, clipped information from the web and photos you take on the device. Kind of a notebook / scrapbook hybrid.

OneNote is integrated pretty tightly with the Surface. It comes pre-installed as a Surface app, meaning it works well with the tablet interface of Windows 8 and the Surface stylus. The stylus allows you to call up OneNote with a click of the button on the end (like clicking a ballpoint pen), and then write your note using handwriting, on the open page. For myself, I have really gravitated to using the stylus and OneNote to take quick notes, in the same way I used to use a pen and a pad of paper. And if you upgrade to OneNote 2013, you can use the "Ink-to-text" feature to turn your handwriting into a digital text document.

Marking up existing documents in OneNote is a great feature. For example, you can import a PowerPoint slide into a note, and then mark it up with your comments and drawings (if you use the stylus). Likewise with a clipped web page. And add-ons like Office Lens, let you use your device camera as a scanner, capturing notes on paper or whiteboards directly into your OneNote notebook. And you can then mark them up as needed. In fact (I haven't tried this yet), I believe you could even capture audio markup and place it in the page (I will try this and confirm in a later post).

You can share your notebooks with other collaborators, via email addresses. People you share with don't even need the OneNote app; they can use OneNote on the web as a web-based application. The OneNote notebooks and their content are all stored in the OneDrive cloud, making them available to any connected device.

Prior to using OneNote with my Surface, I was unsure what an integration of OneNote with Moodle would be good for, or how it would be useful. Now I really want to make this happen.

From a learning system standpoint, consider the markup and collaboration. As a Moodle assignment, OneNote could be submitted for grading. If the OneNote interface was used by all participants, teachers could mark up the submission directly on the pages. And, as a collaborative assignment, multiple users could work on the submission contributing and marking up existing content before submitting.

And that is where we have our focus right now. In the works are integrations to allow OneNote to become an assignment type. To be fair, OneNote can be used to create assignment documents to be submitted by upload to Moodle right now. OneNote allows the exporting of its notes as PDF's, Word docs or as single web pages. But we want to make it work without that extra step.

So, for the next little while, we will be working with the Microsoft Open Technologies group to build out the necessary Moodle pieces. As a start, these will include:

• SSO with Azure Active Directory - necessary to make the account access between Moodle and the cloud seamless for the user.
• OneNote and OneDrive repository plugins - give easy access to document in OneDrive and specific parts of OneNote.
• OneNote assignment plugins.

I will post regular updates to our progress along with my thoughts and experiences with the technologies and how they can be further used with Moodle and the learning environment.

Watch this space for more information on what's coming and how you can be involved.