So I’ve been using OneTastic (the OneNote plugin that allows you to program macros to do things in OneNote automagically) and in the Spring, the author, Omer Atay, nudged the system so that it could deal with both images and embedded files. Previously, it could only deal with text. This meant that my macro (Copy Pages to ClassNotebook by Student) which distributes OneNote Pages into a ClassNotebook based on student names could now include images and files, too! I have one of my test-pages below … you can see how the title lists the Notebook, Student (hidden for privacy), Section and the actual title of the Page … and the Images and embedded files (with printout) below. An exact copy ends up in the student’s Section in the ClassNotebook. Slick!
Microsoft has the ClassNotebook plugin which distributes content to students’ Sections but it doesn’t do it based on programmatically produced pages — and I like being able to make pages up based on another program (say, Word Mail Merge or PowerAutomate … and hopefully DeltaMath!) My macro (described more fully here) allows you to create a Page with the correct Notebook and student’s name & Section and the macro will push the Page into that space. Yes, you could drag&drop them into each Section yourself, but class sizes are growing, it takes time, and about 2% of the time, you drop it in the wrong Section manually.
One place I use this Macro is for our Peer Tutoring program (described here). Our Peer Tutors create a report after each session through a Microsoft Form — it creates an email to the Teacher & Advisor but also creates a OneNote Page for our & the tutor’s records, stored in a OneNote ClassNotebook. This macro correctly files it with the correct tutor. I can run it once a week to push out all the reports at once.
Since I had time at the end of summer, I updated my Macro to allow for images and files to be distributed as well. It wasn’t such a challenge — as you work with a language over time, it starts to make sense, and even after a 6-month gap, it came back pretty quickly.
My next goal is to bring DeltaMath into this mix. The top version of DeltaMath (called “Integral”) allows you to create PDF copies of the DeltaMath assessments, and multiple versions (with solution keys) thereof. My hope is to be able to create these multiple-version assessments, assign them to random students programmatically and then push them into OneNote for the students to complete. That way, every student would get the same-but-different questions to work on, with full solutions that can be pushed out later. We’ll see how that goes!
OneTastic does have a free version — and I highly recommend it because it gives you both Search&Replace and Crop Image, both skills that make life in OneNote a lot easier.
