iPlug-In Notes

Should I take notes by hand or with my laptop? That was the question I had to answer to myself after attending my first-ever lecture in college. I knew laptops are allowed in college, and I always dreamed of using my computer in class for various reasons; taking notes, looking up things on internet related to the topic, and it's seemed so much more fun to take notes on computer rather than writing everything down by hand. And my handwriting isn't that pretty. Even I have hard time understanding notes I take. However, knowing myself, I might get distracted by Facebook, twitter, and sea of internet. So I thought long and hard about this debate. After attending few more classes, and getting use to the vibe of the college, I felt that laptop is necessity to succeed in college. Not only for taking notes, but to take 'better' notes. It will help me organize, share my notes around quickly and many more. So I decided to take notes on my laptop and found it very convenient. I like to surf the web during class to look up things about a topic the professor is talking about.

But, even with laptop, I somewhat felt unorganized. I take notes on everything professor is teaching and have no problem with translating them to my computer. The problem is that it's still unorganized just like my old notes that I wrote by hand. To look up some topic, I still need to hunt down the heading and waste time on finding related note. The way I take notes on my laptop is through Apples office suite of productivity, Pages. It is good word documenting software and I enjoy using it. But, it's still not up there yet in terms of taking notes. When I discovered the Microsoft Word, I was surprised to see such a intuitive and well-made software is being offered by Microsoft. The notebook layout view on Microsoft Word is perfect way to take notes in organized fashion. It offers simplicity and function at the same time. I was very impressed. The layout is created just for taking notes and has a record feature built into it. This is where I applied plug-in note strategy.

The first time I tried this note taking strategy was with my CFS 388 class. I followed the instruction of taking plug-in notes on blackboard. I used the Microsoft Word notebook layout view and took notes in my usual format. After the lecture, I re-read the notes I took. I made few corrections, typos, and made it neat for the review later. Then I created the questions that I think my professor will ask for the next exam. These questions are based on the notes that I took that day. At the end of the week, I will review the lecture notes as well as the questions I made and answer them. The ones that I can't answer will be the one I will have to focus on for the exam.

Plug-in note taking strategy is really helpful because it really helped me to organize my notes and focused on the topic I need to know. Because of the flexibility of software, I can easily change the fonts to highlight something and change the heading of the topic without searching for the marker. I can erase & fix thing with ease, add tables and even audio to my notes. Anticipating questions based on the notes that day is really helpful. The only negative or the limitation this strategy has is that it's really not helpful those courses that require hand-written drawings, formulas; math, chemistry classes. Other than that, I love this strategy and taking notes on this thing. It really encourage to organize my notes and make it more complete.