Many students struggle during lectures and one of the problems that they encounter is the note taking task. With proper note taking technique, students could make their lives a little bit. There’s a lot of information during an hour-long lecture and it is important for students to be able to capture most, if not all of it. There are a number of options that students can take, such using laptops. Many colleges allow students to bring laptops into the classrooms. Using laptops for note taking should be useful if students are able to type quickly. However, in many cases laptops could become unnecessary distractions. It is much simpler to simple use pen and book. Laptops don’t provide us with the usual tactile interaction and it can be bothersome to use keyboards, even with laptops that have touchscreen displays.
A good way to perform note taking is by creating our own short hand. This will allow us to create codes and other short words that represent a longer word or even an idea. It means that we won’t need to write each word and we will be able to save time when writing. However, no one will understand the note and we can’t share it with others. Simple examples for shorthand are w/in for within and w/o for without. With short-hands we should be able to write long sentences with much less efforts. Regardless of our own unique short-hands, we should make sure that we get the general idea of what we write in the classroom. Short-hands are commonly used in text and instant messaging, so this won’t be difficult for students. They should be able to come up with their own codes.
An important thing that we should do is to organize our notes and there are different ways to organize them. As an example, we may organize notes by topic, themes, lecturer, dates and others. The most common way is to organize our notes based on lectures. This will allow us to make bundles for each lectures and we will have better organized notes. Before an exam or when we are working on an assignment, lecture-based notes will be much easier to use. Instead using only words, we could also use diagrams to better represent an idea. A note with diagrams, symbols and short-hands can be much easier to create and they could represent much more information than with just plain text. During a lecture, we may find that diagrams are more suitable, even if they contain a few lines and arrows.
It is important that we are consistent with our own codes and short-hands, so we won’t be lost in translations. In some cases, we may review our notes a few weeks later and we could barely understand any of them. It would be different if we use our codes, diagrams and short-hands each day. If this happens, we could be in trouble and we could end up borrowing notes from fellow students. We should create a note taking convention that we use consistently.