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Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Take Notes In the Modern Classroom?
Krau Ming writes "After about eight years spent in research, I've made the decision to go back to school — medical school. When I last spent the bulk of my days sitting in lectures, I took notes with paper, and if the professor wasn't technologically impaired, he/she would have posted powerpoint slides as a PDF online for us to print and make our notes on. Since it has been so long, I am looking for some options other than the ol' pen and paper. Is there an effective way of taking notes with a laptop? What about tablet options? Are there note-taking programs that can handle a variety of file types (eg: electronic textbooks, powerpoint slides, PDFs)? Or should I just sleep in and get the lectures posted online and delay learning the course material until the exam (kidding)?"
Such a long time, did they already have pen and paper?
I can't remember, so much has changed.
If it were me, I'd stick to good ol' fashioned carbon on paper. I find my ability to retain information increases greatly if I write it down myself, manually.
Of course, YMMV, not everybody learns the same way.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I use Livescribe pens at work and I love it. I wish that the pens were available when I was in university because they are ideal for taking lecture notes. http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/
Sorry to discourage you, but I have found that using pen and paper is the best way to take notes. Why? Maybe it helps your brain process what your trying to learn. It could be that it is distraction free. I know that it is the simplest way to take notes, and often times, the simplest is the best.
Just wait until your buddy finishes taking notes, then take them.
So apparently the technology of the time of personal tape recorders. Not sure if this was his undergrad or law school, but I guess a lot of students rather than attending a long lecure would come in, drop off a tape recorder, press record, and then leave. Apparerently it got so bad that then one day he was late for class or something, and when he got there, the entire classroom was just a bunch of tape recorders recording, and at the front (I can only assume in protest) the prof had brought his own taped lecture and was simply playing it out of his own device!
A sort of analog information transfer...
The act of actually writing helps me to remember the information, particularly since I can't write fast enough to just copy down what's said verbatim and have to think about what to record. In addition, pens are cheap, easily replaced if lost or broken, and don't give you a very tempting distraction in the form of the Internet.
YMMV of course, but that's what works for me.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I have a child about to attend college in the fall. I've already told her to take more notes on paper than with the laptop she's going to get soon. Why? I pulled out my chemistry, calc, and Pascal notes from college courses taken over 20 years ago and showed them to her. One look at them and she understood what I was talking about.
Drawings for chem experiments, flowcharts with notation for my programs, and clear notes with plenty of examples from calc made her understand. The stuff I did with paper and pencil back then would not be easy to replicate as quickly with a laptop. She understands now.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I find the livescribe system brilliant. It is pen and paper, but it records audio and you can transfer your scribblings to computer. The audio and your writing are synced up so you can touch on any part of your writing either on the paper or on the computer and jump to the audio at the time you wrote it.
What, you don't use butterflies to write your notes? Get off my lawn, you petulant n00b!
(Take the test, recycle the notes.)
.. and by 'recycle,' he of course means 'sell on the internet'
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If you're on Windows, Microsoft OneNote is fantastic. You can drag in other files as printouts, then write on them. The text of the printouts is searchable. The individual note pages can be organized in numerous ways (I have tab groups for semester, tabs for classes, then subtabs for each lecture). It can record and transcribe notes, does handwriting conversion, allows writing using a mouse or tablet pen (I use it on a ThinkPad Tablet PC, which makes it even handier).
With a tablet PC, I've used it to write mathematical and chemical formulas directly in my notes, or highlight parts of diagrams from lecture notes or even just dragged from websites (or cut with the snipping tool; with OneNote installed, you can use windows-S as a shortcut key to the snipping tool and past things into your document). You can also export your notes as PDFs.
OneNote has been remarkably useful in undergrad and now in grad school. I highly recommend it. I'm always kind of boggled that MS doesn't market it better; it just sort of 'comes with' Office and they don't really advertise that well.
Evernote is pretty fantastic for organizing notes and then, unlike with pen and paper, you have the ability to attach pdfs, websites, etc etc and search through all of them.
At Cal, they used to give us the notes to the class so you spend your time thinking, not taking notes.
I know Slashdot loves to hate the Tablet PC, but I went through college with it (physics + computer engineering) and graduate school now doing by (PhD computer engineering). I've also tried the iPad in my graduate work, since those didn't exist when I did my undergrad. So let me give you an idea of how I used both and how they worked out for me.
Tablet PC was a Dell Latitude XT. It has a capacitive multi-touch screen and an inductive stylus digitizer. It used Windows 7 as the OS, and my primary method of taking notes was Microsoft One Note. I digitized all my books, and bought digital copies where I could. During class, I had my books open, and when the prof. would reference diagrams or specific sections, I would clip them and paste them into my notes, annotating them there. When the professor had powerpoints available before hand, I would load them into one note and annotate there. The benefit was I could after the fact scan and recognize my handwriting (which I could train the computer to learn to a very high accuracy). Also, with one note you can put tags on specific sections or notes. These tags can be compiled into a summary, so I would typically tag equations or definitions and create quick reference study guides this way. This computer doubled as my work computer so I also installed word, excel, powerpoint, and matlab for homework and presentations. For presentations, powerpoint was especially useful with presenter view and inking capability.
The iPad was much less useful than the Tablet PC for me. I couldn't have two windows open side by side, so clipping segments from PDF to notes was not feasible. Also, the iPad doesn't have a digitizer, so it uses capacitive input for writing. The styluses are huge, and inaccurate, and your palm often causes inaccurate marks. Further, the handwriting recognition in most apps is either nonexistent or terrible. Finally working with fellow students was a pain with the iPad, since the file manager is completely closed off. We couldn't just pass around a USB drive or network our computer together, everything had to be done via drop box, and even then I couldn't open most of the formats they were trying to send me. Printing was also impossible on my campus with the iPad, and connecting to a projector can be problematic. You can't just screen share the iPad with an external display like you can a Windows computer; the particular app has to support that feature.
Now, I think if I were to do it all again I would get a Windows 8 device with a stylus like the Surface Pro. It will run all my windows apps like Office and Matlab, connect to all my devices, network with all the same computers, but have all the touch niceties and touch based apps when it's in tablet mode. The Surface Pro is pretty much what I was hoping the iPad would be, only 3 years later, and honestly if I were doing it all over again, that's where I would start (or a device like it from one of the OEMs). Price and battery life are still up in the air, but they're both most assuredly better than what I paid for my Latitude XT, which I have never regretted buying due to its usefulness.
I bought a hundred-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I was sick of not caring.
This is a bit high-tech, but I've had good results with it.
You're going to need a cylinder of compressed graphite, roughly .5mm in diameter and 5cm in length. Encapsulate it in some ablative material (preferably a renewable organic material) for better grip and structural integrity.
Use this implement to store data on a flexible two-dimensional lattice. The graphite will slowly be worn down as it is deposited on the surface - you will need to continually ablate more of the cover.
Data removal is handled either by disposing of the lattice itself (for bulk erase), or by use of a specialized tool (often attached to one end of the data write implement) for small deletes - although I will note that, after sufficient rewrite cycles, data may be unreadable.
This offers many advantages over traditional computer-based storage. It is far lower-power, functioning off a few milliwatts of energy. It allows for highly flexible unstructured data storage (sort of like NoSQL), and can be improved rapidly by agile development, as no data standards are enforced. I often use a system of my own design to encrypt data by use of an alternative character set (the Unicode committee has, unfortunately, declined to add it to the standard). It also allows more rapid and accurate entry of non-textual or rich-text data.
The only drawbacks are a rather inefficient system for video storage, and it can become rather bulky (while not as dense as the old computer systems, they often have similar or even higher mass). But those are rather minor drawbacks given all the advantages.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/audionote-notepad-voice-recorder/id369820957?mt=8 "...Each note acts as a link directly to the point at which it was recorded, taking you instantly to what you want to hear! Didn't take any notes during the meeting? No problem, you can add them later!"
Generally, you only need to know about 10% of what comes out of the profs mouth. The rest is just extra examples and fluff.
Back in school I had friends who would write down EVERYTHING the prof would say without thinking. (Seriously, one girl I knew would write down what the professor said when greeting the class. I saw "Happy Wednesday, gang! Anyone seen my pointer?" atop one page.) These people took REAMS of notes and studied them for hours and hours. I took minimal notes and studied them quickly. I usually made much better grades. Not because I am a genius, but because I know WHEN something is important. THAT is the skill you need.
Also, sit in the front, you are forced to pay attention.
In the past my job was teaching students about note-taking. I haven't read the current research in a while, at least more than for fun, but here's the upshot as I know it. Take notes. Pencil and paper is probably best because it's the least prone to break and because it can be the most free-form. But the tool is not as important as what you do with it. Don't be slavish. Just take down the high points. Use the recto and the verso. The recto is for in-class, the "note-taking"; the verso is for after class, the "note-taking" most students don't do. This is for notes in which you interpret, summarize, and clarify. Basically it's for reprocessing and setting-up for further review. Then review material frequently at irregular intervals. In a given study session, work on the verso for that day, then review material from the same day a week ago and the same day from one month ago. Also, the best time to study is just prior to some sleep, either the night's sleep or a nap of at least 15-20 minutes. Now, in my experience, many students will respond: Oh no Dr. C____, I'm special/different/exceptional. I'll be more blunt here, in the interest of space: no you're not. At least there are no studies suggesting that any other methods than I've described are more effective. Feel free to supplement with tape-recordings, etc. But remember the main ideas of limited recording, reinterpretation, and frequent review at irregular interviews. (An added brief note: the research is building that, with very, very few exceptions, no one is a "visual" or "verbal" learner; that's mostly 70s touch-feely bullshit. But most people do learn well if they use multiple media for information storage and retrieval. This could be as simple as notes with words and diagrams. And that brings me back to the pencil and the paper.)
Usually my classes are taught by an instructor with a whiteboard.
I pay attention to and interact on the discussion, then periodically snap a photo of the whiteboard now and then with my cameraphone. With an 8MP or so typical smartphone, I can pretty much always crop the photo and read the board easily. The date and time are embedded in the image, so I can easily filter them by lecture (and cross check syllabus for topics) without doing any work. I usually review the image notes before an exam and that's about it. And I never have paper notes to file or dump at the end of the semester.
I find this enables me to pay more attention and interact more during the lecture, which is where I learn the best. Others learn well from transcribing the information; I don't and never have. YMMV.
That's great advice for whatever percentage of the population are auditory learners. For other people, writing down what you hear enhances your recall of it, especially if you copy it into a more legible format after class (akin to your taking 15 mins to summarize). I had friends in college who could have been deaf for all they got out of listening, but they learned everything they needed from the blackboard and the online notes. I had other friends (most of them, actually, since a large majority of engineering students are haptic learners) who couldn't make heads or tails of lectures OR notes until they actually saw an example or did their homework - and after that they'd mastered it.
Different people learn very differently. Blanket statements like "take notes this way" or "just listen, don't write" will work for some people and will be awful for others.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Focus on trying to understand what is being said rather than distracting yourself with trying to record a summary or the highlights. If there's something you need clarified or that doesn't seem to fit to you, ask about it. You'll be solidifying your own understanding of the material and probably helping about a few other students in the same position as you. Other reference resources such as passed out notes or a textbook will be available to you that you can peruse in your own time.
Anyone suggesting using a laptop should be shot. Transcribing your professors words into verbatim text is NOT learning. The laptop fails in the lecture hall for many reasons. It is difficult to inject your own thoughts about the subject matter when you are too busy trying to get every last word the professor is saying, and it is far to tempting to do so. You cannot easily switch to a "drawing" function to draw down diagrams or annotate your notes. Also they are loud, large and annoying hearing the clicking of keys everywhere. If you are taking notes using a laptop, you are not taking good notes, period.
Anyone suggesting using an iPad with stylus should be shot. Steve Job's made it very clear that Apple tablets are not supposed to use pen input, and so pen input on the iPad is a shitty experience. The input resolution of the iPad is way too low, so you can't take anything better then grade school looking chalk lines and Fisher Price looking diagrams. iPad's on screen keyboard is horrible for any kind of note taking.
Most "other" tablets have failed to include decent handwriting tools. Pen input on tablets is too slow and inaccurate to match pen/paper experience. Electronic Pen input forces you to compromise, either due to the lousiness of the hardware or the shiftiness of the software.
Best experience is to use good ol' fashioned pen and paper. Why:
Slows you down, makes you think about what is being said rather then madly transcribing words. Using pen and paper you should be putting your OWN thoughts and words down about the subject matter, not someone else's.
Easy to draw/diagram/annotate. In a math/science course, you will dump using a laptop or tablet simply because the subject matter is just not easy to transcribe to text.
Easy to annotate after the fact. If the professor linked a point previously made it is very easy to go back with pen and paper to add additional notes at the point they where taken.
I have lousy hand writing so I always took notes twice, once in the lecture hall and then would spend a little bit of time after class cleaning up the notes. Forced me to think twice about the lecture and so could add/update the notes.
When I took hand written notes, I actually could remember when points where made and easily find them, even weeks or months later. Using a laptop I found one page looked exactly like another so trying to find some point made during a lecture 3 months ago was impossible.
While their is a certain appeal of using technology to take lecture notes, realize that the lecture process has not changed in hundreds of years. A boring old fart droning on about largely irrelevant information doesn't require 21st century note taking tech.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
If you are in Medicine, you will be wasting your time taking more than a page of notes.
There is such an incredible amount of information in all things medical that you just have to decide what material to read that will match your Teacher's theme and topics. You can probably download somebody else's notes that highlights the important points, pharma doses, lab figures, etc.
You have to read, review, listen to videos and then read some more. Take a look at what Kaplan offers for example.