Back in March this year I was incredibly excited to hear that Microsoft had finally released a version of OneNote for Apple MacBooks running OS X. However, it became immediately apparent this was “OneNote Lite” with heavily restricted functionality and I blogged about my frustrations here.
Early this morning I saw a tweet showing that Microsoft had released a crucial update that would bring the long-awaited functionality to Mac users, on both OS X and iOS platforms:
Full information can be found on this link but the key benefits are:
- Access your work or school notebooks on your Mac stored on OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online (on Office 365).
- Open and insert files, including PDF files, into your notebook pages.
- View your password protected sections.
- Improved organization, capturing content, and sharing of notes.
The first point is critical for students at St Andrew’s College, many of whom bring a MacBook to school (numbers of Year 9 Students with Apple devices shown here).
I made a screencast for our students to use to help them connect to OneNote on their Macs:
This was also posted on the front page of our Moodle LMS for increased visibility.
In some ways this free update helps close the circle of functionality for our College – whilst not enjoying complete parity, MacBook users now have far greater ease of access to OneNote which is a tool that increasing numbers of our teachers are using in their classrooms.
A neat feature to see added to the iOS versions of OneNote would be inking – the ability to use a stylus within OneNote on the iPad or iPhone. Here’s hoping this is not too far away!
