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Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking?
First time accepted submitter spencj writes "I'm just starting year two of medical school, and I've been rethinking the way I make and create notes/study guides. One of the problems I've considered is that we learn about the same topic in several arenas. For example, if I consider some disease like coronary artery disease, I will likely learn about this topic in cardiology, radiology, pharmacology, and then in outside study resources such as Kaplan guides, online resources, etc.. Further, it will come up in August, October, March, April, etc.. My dream app is some combination of Excel, Visio, Word, and a blog where I could tag selections of text. If I then 'filtered' by certain parameters, it would collapse all the information I'd collected from different resources. For example, say I create a flowchart in Visio, take some notes in Word, create a table in Excel, and save from text from a web resource. I tag each item with 'coronary artery disease,' then I want to quickly query for all of my items with this tag. Is there any kind of app or resource that can pull this off? Medical students everywhere would be grateful."
Nothing I've yet discovered is as flexible, reliable, and controllable. every digital attempt I've seen/tried has been inferior. You might try recording the lectures as you go in case you need to go back for context at some point, especially if you go back and type them later.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Since you're needing to record info from Word, Excel and Visio, OneNote would be perfect to consolidate the information in place. You can also include images, video and webpages.
A wonderfully creative way to post a slashvertisement for Microsoft OneNote. Well done.
Me, I've used those standard black lab books for my note taking for my daily work for almost 2 decades, and it's tough to do better. At least, for me it is.
You can always write your own mind maps or some kind of wiki later ... but, for the first pass, nothing is more flexible than pen and paper notes since it supports multiple languages, terminologies, and creating diagrams. No upgrades of licenses to worry about. ;-)
And a lab book has the advantage of being hard-covered as well as being pretty obvious if pages have been removed (which is why they use them as lab books in the first place).
Technology has all sorts of failure points and limitations. And most alternatives to pen and paper either have in-built limitations, or in the long run are harder to actually keep your notes with.
I'm not saying you shouldn't look at some technology to see if it helps, but for me, good old fashioned bound paper notebooks are still my preferred way, and look to remain so. I've got a stack of about 40-50 to them that I periodically refer back to.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Except what you're describing isn't rote rehearsal. The act of synthesizing your notes from multiple sources into a coherent thing actually causes you to think about what it all means and understand it in a broader context.
Me, the one and only time I decided I was going to cheat on an exam, by time time I wrote up my notes containing the information I wanted and had it all laid out the way I wanted -- I didn't need my notes. It was like studying works or something. ;-)
Rote rehearsal is just memorizing without really thinking about what it means -- and you can't easily rearrange, summarize, and cross reference your own notes without thinking about the meaning of it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I was told this when I started at university but it took me until my final year to truly grok it.
Each one hour lecture should take 3 hours of your time. One hour in the lecture itself, one hour within the next day or two (at most, ideally same day so things are fresher in your mind) when you annotate the notes you had taken, redraw bad diagrams, look stuff up etc. Don't hope or expect to get 'perfect' notes from the lecture itself. Then finally one hour before the exam to go over that hour of lecture time.
As others have said, pen and paper is king for that first hour in the lecture itself. Anything you try to do with technology should concentrate on the second hour.
I'll add my two cents for OneNote.
Pen & eraser input on tablets that support it (Surface Pro, for instance), OCR, handwriting recognition, speech recognition... And it's relatively easy to use.
>> I'm just starting year two of medical school, and I've been rethinking the way I make and create notes/study guides
As a former medical student (and now practicing physician), I'm amazed you're going to class in the second year. It may sound like a joke, but at my medical school, the entire second year class could not fit into the auditorium at the same time....people just stopped going, and relied on the note taking service and read their books or the syllabus provided for the class. I guess if you're in a PBL program it may be different....but then your material is already organized that way (see below for PBL)
You're scaring me dude. The doctors that I've known have been able to cram away a lot of information in their heads, and note-taking wasn't one of their problems in year two of med school. As a potential patient, you have me worried already...
Meh....you learn a lot of junk in the first two years of school. Its like learning to rivet and weld so that you can fly a plane....yeah, it's nice to know, but most pilots don't need to know it. The problem is, to be a good doctor you need to know a lot of specialized information, that requires understanding of basic material. Since you don't (can't) know what you're going to specialize in in the future, they fill your head with what we think a doctor should know. As time and training go on, you forget a lot of the information that you don't use (and don't need to know). But a lot of it is still there....I amaze my residents by recalling tidbits I learned 10 years ago and never saw or used since...that's what makes a good physician a great one.
And as far as sitting in class and memorizing it....I will just tell you that you have no idea of the volume of material that is poured into medical students. Which in and of itself is a problem, but you also (as mentioned) need to mentally cross-reference the material to other lectures over several years. Part of this is why they have been doing problem based learning....instead of teaching anatomy, physiology, microbiology, genetics, pharmacology, pathology, neuroscience, and clinical medicine as separate classes, they now teach a cardiology core where you learn heart anatomy, heart physiology, heart microbiology, heart genetics, heart pharmacology, heart pathology, heart neuroscience(lol), and clinical heart medicine, followed by the pulmonary core....etc