School Supplies

Maddisyn,

I personally prefer a separate notebook, and pocket folder, for each class. I prefer the steno pad notebooks. They are easier to hold and manipulate. And index cards are a must for vocabulary-intense classes! I also like little tabs I can put on the notes for quick reference, and of course, highlighters are a must! Notes need to be highly organized when it comes time for that open-note, open-book mid-term and final! Especially if the exam is timed!

The challenge is in synthesizing all the material. Let's say you are studying taxonomy -how living things are classified. You may have textbook reading, lecture material, and a video the professor has told you to watch. Each of these will talk about taxonomy, and may include important points not included in the other two. So you want a way to bring all of this information together, in the same part of your notes. You may need to write and re-write! Also, some professors will provide PowerPoint notes. Don't just print them out, but add more to them so that they make sense to you. Remember to use charts and illustrations to help you "see" the relationships between concepts!

Take advantage of on-line resources that accompany your textbooks. You may be able to highlight on-line as you go, and then save all these notes to one page. Remember to highlight the section headings as well, so the notes make more sense!

If you prefer to have hard-copies of material, be prepared to do a lot of printing.

On a final note: At the beginning of the semester, try to pin down the professor as to where they draw their test questions from. You don't want to spend hours reviewing the readings, only to find the test is 100% from the lectures!

Best of luck!

Kim

Hi Maddisyn,

In my later years I started taking notes on a tablet and found that it works super well for me. In undergrad, I used an old Ipad running Evernote, I believe. In grad school I moved to an android tablet with a dedicated stylus (I had a Samsung Galaxy 10.1, for the record) which has much better handwriting performance, honestly almost as easy as writing on paper once you get used to it. There are plenty of articles online which talk about the best tablets for handwriting notes, so maybe do some googling.

I have pretty terrible handwriting and I also find that I end up rewriting things a lot as I take notes (Sometimes you just mishear things or want to rephrase things). The electronic format makes corrections less cluttered than erasing or crossing out errors. Organizationally, I like having literally everything in one place. Microsoft OneNote lets you create, say a "notebook" for a semester, a "section" for each class and "pages" for each lecture/assignment (which can actually be infinitely long pages, so you never run out of room if you're, say, drawing a large sketch). It all backs up automatically, so you will never lose your notebook, even if you lost or broke your tablet. It can always be recovered on a computer by signing into your account.

This option saved me a TON of printing. All PDFs and presentations could just be pasted into OneNote or uploaded into my google drive, even composited so that lecture slides could be stuck into parts of your reading or other notes where they were relevant. It was all there, all the time, in one place. Even my textbooks were sometimes available digitally so my tablet was also my texts. Welcome to the 21st century.

The main issue to look out for are profs that shun technology in the classroom. They still exist, and you'll likely find them. Ask at the beginning of the semester if 1) they are okay with you taking electronic notes in class, I've never had a problem with this one, as long as it's not a laptop, 2) they allow you to use electronic notes for the test. Good professors write their exams such that they cannot be easily cheated on. That said, some professors still will not let you do this but I do hope this is starting to change. 3) They will be providing presentations/extra readings/etc. in a format that you will be able to use on the tablet.

In terms of cost, I recommend buying an older, cheaper device. Note taking is not a heavy task, you do not need a top of the line tablet or computer for doing so. I bought my 4 year old android tablet for $150. It lasted me two years, 8 or so classes and still serves me well to this day taking notes at meetings/etc. On top of that, I decided it was unnecessary to upgrade my laptop, since the tablet became my primary tool. Not having to lug my 4 lb laptop to campus every day was nice, but not having to spend a few hundred on something lighter, faster or at least with better battery life was well worth the money I spent on the tablet.

Hi,

My number 1 recommendation for anyone taking an online class is to physically schedule time to attend each class for a set amount of time. How many times a week and for how long will depend on the class, what the format for the class will be, what type of assignments you have and their due dates. I also recommend that when you get your syllabus for each class, go through it carefully and schedule any test dates, assignment due dates in you planner. If you are not accustomed to taking online classes, it can be a transition. Good luck this semester.