Microsoft Takes On Google Classroom App With The New OneNote Class Notebook Creator

Google announced Classroom for Google Apps for Education customers few months back. Classroom helped teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly, including time-saving features like the ability to automatically make a copy of a Google Document for each student. It also creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student to help keep everyone organized. Students can keep track of what’s due on the Assignments page and begin working with just a click. Teachers can quickly see who has or hasn’t completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback and grades right in Classroom.

Today, Microsoft announced a direct competitor called OneNote Class Notebook Creator. This was developed in partnership with Microsoft Research and Microsoft China and it helps teachers quickly set up a personal workspace for every student, a content library for handouts and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities—all within one powerful notebook.

Built on Office 365 and SharePoint Online, the OneNote Class Notebook Creator saves teachers time and boosts classroom efficiency by:

• Making it easier to collect homework, quizzes, exams and handouts.
• Enabling all student work and teacher feedback to be exchanged automatically in one place virtually anytime, anywhere.
• Combining real-time, individualized coaching of a shared notebook with the collaborative creativity of OneNote and digital handwriting.

The app creates a OneNote class notebook, which is organized into three areas:

• Student notebooks: Private notebooks that are shared between the teacher and each individual student. Teachers can access these notebooks at any time, but students cannot see each other’s notebooks.
• Content library: A place where teachers can handout course materials to students.
• Collaboration space: A space for anyone in the class to share, organize and collaborate.

This will be a free app for educators with Office 365 and is available today in the Office Store.