What do you use to take notes?

For all my prerequisite lectures and labs, I always took notes by hand and then typed them later on my laptop. It always made me remember the material better. I start a BSN program next week, and I plan on doing the same technique.

My first semester I took written notes for everything. I did best on tests when I read before class, took notes, and then during lecture added to and highlighted my notes from the reading. It kept the information fresh in my mind without being too repetitive. I also love colors and am a visual and kinesthetic learner, so taking notes twice and with lots of different pens and highlights worked really well or me.

But then about a month before the end of the semester I bought an iPad and began using the app GoodNotes and fell in love. It lets you import documents, including power points, and you can take notes directly on them. I love it. Just letting you know in case you had a tablet or was wanting one. GoodNotes is the best.

Basically just figure out what your best learning styles are and take notes or study based on them. Work smarter not harder :)

Hope this helps!

If you are a typer of notes Microsoft One Note will change your life. So much better than using just Word. There are a couple of threads just today on this subject, and if you check the one named OneNote you will see my detailed description of what One Note can do.

Another by-hand note taker here - I'm a pretty slow typist so I find that taking notes by hand allows me to stay more engaged in the lecture while it's being presented. I'm also a visual/kinesthetic learner so typing out and color-coding my hand-written notes afterward helps me retain the information much better than taking notes on my laptop and just reading them over. But that's just me; everyone has their own study quirks, experiment a little and figure out what works best for you. :)

I also am slow at typing so I take notes by hand in a composition book. I also like it because I can take them with me to the kids sports practices, events etc instead of lugging my laptop. Haven't got a tab or IPad but maybe Christmas lol (hoping my husband reads this :) )

Good day:

I take hand written notes that I then retype (typically the same day); I end up keeping both sets of notes (in separate areas).

For me, I find that rewriting the notes (typically re-listening to the recorded lecture) helps me to really stick the information in memory; and I often will google related images to stick in with my type written notes to make it easier come study time.

One of my fall classes has an instructor that forbids any electronics in the classroom unless there is a valid learning disability; since I only use pen and paper, that's not an obstacle.

Thank you.

I type up all my notes on my laptop. For lecture, they let us download the powerpoints so I add the lecture notes to the powerpoints. For the readings, I read each chapter fully while typing an outline at the same time highlighting the key points. For clinical, I always have a very mini notebook that I use for my notes, vitals, blah blah. Clipboard is nice to have, but I found it too big and bulky and it was a hassle to carry that around with my mega big drug guide book so I resorted to using that small notebook I have.

I take notes by hand, I can usually keep up but I also use the Quickvoice app to record lectures on my iPad. It's a great app and then I can always go back and listen again if I missed something. All of our teachers are cool with this and there's several of us who record the lectures. We can then also email them to each other (we all get along so we help each other out).

In my prerequisites (particularly A&P1, A&P2, and Micro) I would take notes on the handouts that were provided and highlight the important information. If there was not enough room on the page I would take any extra notes on notebook paper and made sure I knew what section it was for. Sometime during the week I would try and rewrite or retype my notes into outline form combining what the professor had and my hand written notes. This worked out well when I figured this method out. I start an ADN program next week so I do not know how well it will work with nursing lectures yet.