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)?"

Comments

8 years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a long time, did they already have pen and paper?
I can't remember, so much has changed.

Re:8 years ago...

[quantumghost]

Such a long time, did they already have pen and paper? I can't remember, so much has changed.

Hmmmm....Actually went to medical school > 8 years ago....let me detail somethings that most may not know about it....

1st year for a "traditional" medical school, fall semester is usually biochem and anatomy....both usually involve a lot of diagrams and less note taking. Your prof may or may not have handouts....ours used slides and were just transitioning to powerpoint....no joke...but think about it...not much of that information has changed over the years....esp for anatomy. Biochem, they add on for a (very) few new disease processed, and recently added the HMGCoA pathway.

Spring is usually histology and physiology....again histo is a lot of drawing of cells. Physio is less so, but more flow chart like diagrams. Micro...some note taking some diagrams....Neuro science...._lots_ of diagrams....

2nd year....hardly anyone goes to class....our second year class room was ~1/3 the size of the first year....so small that the entire 2nd year class could not fit into the lecture hall at the same time. I am neither joking nor exaggerating. Fall is pharm...good for notetaking...as is path....spring is a continuation of path and intro clinical medicine....again both are ok for note-taking.

The problem here is also that most schools still have a note-service....this is where someone is responsible for taping the lectures and distributing them out for people to review and type out the notes....the original crowd-sourcing. This is usually why most realize that going to class is rarely helpful.

3rd year....clinicals...ha - forget about note taking....you're on the move constantly, and scribbling furiously on a scrap of paper, and mostly reading out of a pocket sized book when you have those rare moments of down time....that or you're sleeping. The few lectures you have, you'll be too busy eating, or catching up on sleep. No...not kidding here either.

4th year....you pick easy electives, finish your core classes.....the fall you're off interviewing for residency, you hardly ever take notes..."'cause you know it all" already. You're just killing time til you match and then killing more time til you graduate.

Intern year.....you realize you know squat -- just like 3rd year of med school, but now you actually have responsibility! You never get a chance to sit through a lecture cause you're damn pager is going off...during rounds the orders are barked out so quickly, you'll only be able to jot 1/2 of it down on any available scrap of paper....you'll devise your own system of how to handle this....and I assure you....it will not be electronically.

2nd year....you actually find that you did learn something the previous year (must have been via diffusion)....but now you're the one barking orders, or you have a much better idea of what's coming so you rarely have to write much down.

Just my $0.02....YMMV

Source: Spent the last 9 years as a resident/fellow and the 4 years prior to that as a med student....and saw everyone else doing the _same_exact_thing_.

Stick With What Works

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Re:Stick With What Works

[Hatta]

I find my ability to retain information increases greatly if I pay attention. If I'm writing, I'm not paying attention, I'm just a passive conduit for words going in my ears and out my fingers. If I do take notes, I generally find myself wondering what the hell I meant. Better to just pay attention in class and read the text. Notes are worthless.

Re:Stick With What Works

[Baloroth]

No offense but maybe your brain just fails to multitask.

Assuming he is a human, of course his brain does. As does yours, mine, and Stephen Hawking's. No human brain can actually multitask. Some people are just faster at switching between one task and another than others.

Re:Stick With What Works

[Genda]

Bring a point and shoot with a 12 MP res or higher, and video the course. Take high res snap shots of chalkboard or displays depending on presentation. That evening, edit video to just the stuff that matters. pump what you want through "Dragon; Naturally Speaking". edit, and highlight the text, imbed snap shots. Date the seminar with the video highlights and place in a neatly marked folder. Reread/View notes over the weekend, you remember more. If you can take you textbooks in digital form, you have a perfect way of making your class a part of a larger digital library. Better yet, break the content into smaller bits, store chucks in a database and add metadata for search. The act of managing the data will demand that you understand it so you can parse its nature and properly store it. Each section of each class will have its notes, classroom video, images, book information, scanned handouts, chapter questions, pop quizzes. In short, everything you need for the mid term and final, to pass with flying colors.

Livescribe

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:Livescribe

[mark_reh]

I went through a year of my didactic classes in dental school using a livescribe pen exclusively. Almost all lectures were done with power point so my notes mostly consisted of writing down slide numbers whenever a slide was changed. The pen links the text to the audio so when i review the ppts if I wanted to know what was being said while a particular slide was on-screen I could just tap the slide number int he notes and get the info straight from the horse's mouth. Whenever the work test was mentioned in the context of "this is going to be on the test", I wrote the word "test". If someone asked a good question and/or received a good answer I wrote "listen". The other thing that is great is the software on the computer searches your handwritten text and highlights wherever you wrote the searched-for text. When I want to find all those instances of the word "test" in my notes, the desktop software finds them for me and I can click and hear all the relevant info without having to listen to two hours of lecture.

It really made studying and note taking easy and was completely reliable. My 1 GB pen held about 3 weeks worth of all-day, every-day lectures.

I still use the pen for my "engineering" notebook so I'll have copies of whatever I write on ym computer.

With force? =)

[colin_faber]

Just wait until your buddy finishes taking notes, then take them.

Reminds me a story my dad told me...

[DarthVain]

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...

Re:Reminds me a story my dad told me...

[drinkypoo]

the prof had brought his own taped lecture and was simply playing it out of his own device!

Or maybe your dad just saw Real Genius.

Re:Reminds me a story my dad told me...

[kat_skan]

Have you considered the possibility that your dad is Val Kilmer?

Paper and pencil still trumps all others.

[logicassasin]

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.

Livescribe

[Jabes]

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.

MS OneNote

[foeclan]

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.

Tablet PC

[Missing.Matter]

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.

Re:Tablet PC

[Pigeon451]

+1, totally agree. Typical tablets aren't great for taking notes. Maybe for annotating PDFs, but beyond that, not much use. If Onenote was ported to Android or Apple then it might be OK, but still limited by the OS.

A tablet PC is much better, as it's a real computer with a touch screen. Combine that with Microsoft Onenote and you have a very powerful (albeit expensive) note taking machine. Onenote is excellent at digitizing your scribbles so you can search for it later. It even has audio transcription, but I've never tried it. You can have Onenote documents open over multiple computers (via Dropbox or Microsoft's own service) and they all update seamlessly.

I'm not a big fan of Microsoft's bloated products, but Onenote is a wonderful program.

To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg

[kat_skan]

I bought a hundred-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I was sick of not caring.

Go high-tech

[gman003]

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.

This was my job

[supercrisp]

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.)