What is meant by "change filter" of the student list?
It offers options to limit the list of students in the Teacher's Notebook according to different criteria. For example, you can limit the list to students who are repeating a course for failure, and then send them an email that you want them to sign up for a specific seminar group. Or you can select students who have enrolled in the course with "requirements fulfilled" grade, and then want to give them "requirements fulfilled" grade in bulk.
The Teacher's Notebook applications thus work using the list of students you have selected with the appropriate filters. They display a smaller number of students and perform any bulk operations on this smaller list of students. You can access the filter change as well as an overview of the selected filters in the Teacher's Notebook header.