OneNote tips and tricks for math teachers

For some students, math is challenging and occasionally even scary. Give your students extra confidence by using OneNote in your lessons plans.

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Use OneNote’s Math Assistant

OneNote can help your students solve all kinds of math problems. In OneNote, you can type out math problems followed by the equal sign, and then hit enter. For example, you can type:

5 + 5 =

Once you press the spacebar, OneNote will automatically solve the problem for you.
Math teachers can find more complex equations for their students to solve in OneNote. To find equations:

• Click the Insert tab.
• Select Equation.
• Choose the equation that you want your students to solve.

Inserting an equation rather than typing it out makes teaching faster and easier. Some of the equations and formulas that you can add to your OneNote pages include:

• Area of a circle
• Binomial theorem
• Fractional equations
• Expansion of a sum
• Pythagorean theorem
• Quadratic formula

Math teachers can also easily insert symbols into their OneNote pages. To insert special symbols:

• Click the Insert tab.
• Select Equation.
• Choose the symbol that you want to insert into your notes. For example, you can add the not equal symbol or the delta symbol to your notes.

Handwrite notes and math equations

Math teachers should encourage students with tablet devices to take handwritten notes in OneNote using their stylus. There is evidence that handwriting your notes rather than typing them improves memory.¹ Students with messy handwriting can take advantage of OneNote’s Ink to Math feature. This feature converts your handwritten notes into text. To use the Ink to Math feature:

• Write your equation using the Draw tool.
• Click Lasso Select.
• Once your equation has been selected, click Ink to Math.
• A window will appear. Click Insert.
• Your equation will be added to your notes in plain text.

You can also convert your handwritten equations into plain text by clicking Ink to Math, handwriting your equation in the window, and then inserting it into your notes.

Share notes with students

OneNote is ideal for math teachers because they can share their notes and lesson information with their entire class. If you’re a math teacher and you want to share your OneNote notebook:

• Click the File tab.
• Click Share.
• From here, you’ll have the option to share your notes via email, or you can share a link to the notebook with your students.

Organize your lesson plans

Math teachers can use OneNote to organize their lesson plans. By creating your lesson plans in OneNote, you can back up your notes so that you’ll never lose them. Backing up your notes also allows you to access your lesson plan from anywhere—for example, you can view your lesson plan from your home computer or your work computer.
Create a new notebook just for your lesson plans. To create a new notebook:

• Click the notebook icon.
• Select Add Notebook.
• Choose where you’d like to store your notebook. If you can, store it in OneDrive so that it’s backed up.
• Choose a notebook name. Once you’ve named your notebook, click Create Notebook.
• Organize your lesson plans by date. To create a new page for each lesson plan, click Add Page on the right-hand side.
• To rename each page, right-click the page, then type in your lesson plan name.

If you’re ever looking for a specific lesson plan, make your search even faster by clicking the search icon on the righthand side. You can also press Ctrl + E to search through your notebook.

If you’re a math teacher that still doesn’t have OneNote, you can get OneNote for free. For more OneNote tips, learn how you can keep your notes organized.

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