Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Take Notes In the Modern Classroom? 364
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)?"
MS OneNote (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Tablet PC (Score:5, Interesting)
+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.
Re:Livescribe (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:8 years ago... (Score:5, Interesting)
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_.