Student tips: making connections with Microsoft OneNote

Technology can help us make connections between concepts and think less linearly. That’s how my mind works—tangentially. One thing relates to another.

I began using OneNote partly because of the novelty of taking notes with a stylus on a tablet. I also like how it cuts down on paper waste and creates a backup of my notes automatically in the cloud.

But I found that OneNote also works better for me because of how you can use it to map concepts and relate them together.

Unlike a paper notebook, each page in OneNote is an infinite, scrolling panel where you can write, type, draw, capture audio and video, and link to other pages in OneNote or on the web.

It’s a very visual medium. It’s fun to use, and it mirrors the way different aspects of a class or a discipline can be connected together and to everything else.

OneNote is organized into notebooks, which each have their own sections and pages. You can create a new notebook for each class or project you’re working on, then put all the information you learn there as you go, and organize it however you want.

Each notebook is synced to the cloud using your Microsoft account. There are OneNote apps for desktop and mobile, and a web app at onenote.com.

I worked on a project analyzing the poem “The Buffalo” by Marianne Moore. There are all these references, and at first I didn’t know what was going on. So I went through and made notes in OneNote.

I ended up with a color-coded, visual representation of the connections I made while studying the poem. When I showed it to my advisor, she said, “I think you have something here,” and encouraged me to use the notes I had made in my final presentation. It was nice to be able to easily present on material using the notes you took during the process.

Are you a UB student, faculty or staff member with a favorite technology tool? We want to hear about it! Send us your favorite technology tools and tips to ubit-communication@buffalo.edu.