Your Guide to Digital Note-Taking

By Jordyn Austin on May 23, 2017

As a college student, taking notes can be very important in a class. Some students prefer the traditional way of taking notes by pen and paper. However, digital notes have become more and more popular. Digitized notes eliminate the waste of paper and can be more convenient for students.

There are plenty of ways to take notes digitally. There may be some pros and cons to each, so by the time you’re done reading this article, you may be able to make up your mind about whether or not you want to shift over to the “digital side.” Here are some of the best practices for taking notes digitally.

One of the best practices for taking notes digitally is first choosing the right device that fits your needs. Sizes in laptops do matter. Laptops with smaller screens can be convenient for travel from class to class, but they can be a little hard to see at times. On the other hand, larger laptops give that easy-to-see screen but they may be a little heavy to carry around all the time. Choosing the right size device for your personal needs is important because you’ll more than likely be stuck with the same device for the rest of your college career so long as it performs well. Make sure you pick a device you will be comfortable with in the long run.

Taking notes on laptops has a lot of benefits. You can store your notes in more than one place, just in case something gets deleted. You can also easily share your notes with a peer who may have missed class by simply attaching them to an email. Laptops have the added factor of being able to search the internet for an example of something in lecture and being able to copy and paste it right into your notes.

image via https://pixabay.com

Tablets are also a good way to take digital notes. You can purchase a keyboard and the tablet would function just like a laptop. The one advantage to tablets is being able to detach the keyboard and just use the tablet. This makes it convenient for travel as well. There are plenty of different tablets out there to choose from. Be sure to go in the electronic stores and play around with the different options. Most stores have demo laptops and tablets out for your use.

image via https://pixabay.com

When you take down notes, you want to be able to write as quickly as possible because sometimes professors move pretty fast during lecture. You want to be able to write notes down quickly and know what they mean when it comes time to go back and study them. To aid this, you can try out new techniques for digital note taking like shorthand. You can create your own shorthand that you are able to read and understand. This makes taking notes go faster and more efficiently. You can create a key in a word document that has the meaning of all your typical shorthand words and symbols. If you do not want to create your own shorthand, there are plenty that already exist, if you just do a simple Google search.

When you are taking digitized notes, it may be easier to take them like an outline. It is easy to do in software like Microsoft Word. The option to outline and bullet can be found with the click of a button. This will make your notes look neater and will help you find certain topics of your notes easier. Do not forget Microsoft Word gives you the option to highlight as well. This eliminates you having to spend money on highlighters.

One of the best ways to effectively take notes digitally is to improve your listening skills. It helps to be able to listen and pick out the most important things a lecturer is saying. Most of the time it is ineffective to write down every single word someone is saying. This will not only slow you down but also cause you to possibly miss the “meat” or takeaway message because you are so busy trying to copy down every word.

Learn to listen for keywords and important definitions that will help you grasp the overall concept of the lecture. Make sure you are also writing it down in such a way that you remember what it means when you get back home to study. It is important to put key concepts into your own words. If you cannot do this, then you probably do not have a good grasp on what the concept means. Therefore, typing it out probably will not increase your chance to know what it means later. Using multimedia elements like videos, links, and drawing can enhance your learning and also be great practice.

Happy digital note-taking!

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