DIGITAL NOTE TAKING 101 _ GoodNotes + OneNote Tips for iPad_Laptop

In my last semester of university I decided to go 100% paperless and since sharing that news with all of you I've gotten a lot of questions about digital note-taking in university. So today I'm answering all of those questions and I'm going to be sharing some of my favorite digital note-taking apps and tips. So why go digital? Well for one you're not going to be using paper and ink especially if you're someone who tends to print lecture slides and readings you're not going to have space in your home taken up by binders or notebooks full of material that you think you're going to need one day but honestly at least in my experience any questions that did come up I never went to my notes. I would just go to Google because Google knows many things and it's much faster. I even printed photos of lecture slides like what? You're too new as a different beast. Two, all of your notes whether you type them or handwrite them with a stylus can potentially be searchable and I think this really comes in handy when a study season comes around and you are looking to brush up on very specific topics. Three, you don't have to remember to carry around all of your notes. If you have some sort of cloud-based storage in place you have access to your notes wherever you are which can be a really good option for commuters especially. If your typing skills are strong enough it can also be faster than writing by hand which is most beneficial during lectures where you have professors that like to talk really really really really fast. It is always stressful when professors do that. I wish they wouldn't but you inevitably will come across a few of those kinds of professors in your time at school. Now as great as it is to be able to write down notes faster I definitely think you can become more vulnerable to autopilot mode which is writing things down without actually processing anything that you're writing down. I have encountered this many many many times throughout university and one of the best ways I think to combat that is to focus on making good looking notes. And by good looking notes I don't mean that you have to be making aesthetically pleasing Pinterest worthy, Instagram worthy notes because that's not really realistic but I do mean making notes that are well thought out and made to be more functional by using tools like highlighters and boxes to group together information or bring attention to key ideas. And I'll be sharing some more specific tips later on in the video but a more functional note will I think just end up being more pleasing to the eye because you will have thought it through and it won't be this endless document of writing. All the important info will stand out and that'll make it a more attractive note for you to look at. So to ensure that I'm taking advantage of both the functionality and efficiency that can come with digital note taking I have a system for whether I'm typing notes or handwriting with a stylus that consists of two phases. The just get the information down phase and review and formatting. For my typing needs I do like a traditional laptop experience which is probably just influenced by the fact that I had started university with a laptop so that's just what I'm used to. I used my MacBook Pro a lot in school because I use Final Cut Pro for my YouTube videos but I also use Windows PC laptops. I was in a business program so I didn't really have any super heavy computer needs and both did the job quite well. So I wouldn't say one is better than the other but you do tend to get more bang for your buck going the PC route. If you're in the market for a laptop and you don't have any other device I would look into a hybrid option so that you can have the best of both worlds and switch from laptop to tablet mode. Now you definitely don't need a stylus to be able to take notes digitally. There's a lot that you can do with just typing and your keyboard but I think for certain types of students a stylus makes digital note taking a lot more practical. So for example if you are a math student who has to work through equations all the time I think a stylus is almost absolutely necessary because writing down equations on your computer takes a lot of time and then working through problems just on a keyboard is not very good for brainstorming. I use a combination of OneNote and GoodNotes. OneNote has been one of my favorite note taking tools for years and I love the fact that it's possible to use it on so many different devices. I prefer it to Microsoft Word because accessing notes for each week in class is so much easier on OneNote. You just have to click a button and you can navigate between weeks and classes. You can also search through all your notes for every single class at once which again saves a lot of time. I pretty much only use Word for when I'm writing essays or assignments that need to be handed in because you have more formatting options. That being said I tend to use OneNote for most of my typing needs and also as my cloud-based storage of choice but you can absolutely use it with a stylus as well. I have done it in the past but when it comes to using a stylus I do now gravitate towards GoodNotes on my iPad for a few reasons. Unlike OneNote which is this endless document that you can fill, GoodNotes makes you write on one digital piece of paper at a time which kind of gives you a little bit more structure and feels more like you're writing on a physical piece of paper. GoodNotes also has a feature that zooms into the page so that you a can focus on more cleanly writing so your handwriting digitally is going to look a lot better but it will also track what you are writing so that you can shift along the without having to move the paper yourself. So this is really helpful for long writing sessions and I really love this feature when doing reading notes. Just as a side note if you're wondering why I chose GoodNotes over other apps like Notability I don't really have a good answer for you. It was just a more pleasing interface to me when I looked at the screenshots of each app so I went with GoodNotes but I've heard good things about Notability as well. So if I type and use a stylus when do I do which? Well I typically type lectures and written assignments and I would digitally handwrite reading notes, study reviews, and outlines for essays. Something new I started using in January was my iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil. I had bought the Apple Pencil in December because I wanted to experiment with more digital art in 2019 which as a side note the Procreate app is probably my favorite thing ever for doodling or creating animations like the one you're looking at right now. But I quickly realized that it'd also be great for digitally handwriting notes because there's some awesome apps on the iOS store and I had seen other people who are in the study space online talk about using the iPad for note-taking so this felt like a really great opportunity to experiment with it. I have to admit it was a pretty great tool to have in my last semester. I feel like having the Apple Pencil made me use my iPad so much more and now even outside of school I'm using it a lot so probably one of my favorite accessories that I've gotten in quite a while. Let's first take a good look at OneNote. These are some notes that I jotted down for a market research class that I had last semester. It's just a list of bullet pointed text and one of the first things I like to do to make it look cleaner is to add gaps between topics so it's just easier to read. DaFont and Coolers are great sites to visit to get customized fonts for your notes or even a customized color palette. After four years of university I was definitely just over all the pre-installed things and a lot of the apps that you come across so if you can find a way just to add a little something something to your notes, get you excited to be note-taking again, I feel like adding fonts and cool colors is a really easy not so tedious way to do that. Something I also really love to do in OneNote is to use columns to my advantage so I'll make the first column the column that contains my notes from a specific lecture and then right beside it I can add extra info, questions, definitions, keywords, I can really expand on whatever the content of that lecture was and I'll make it a different color just so visually it's easy to distinguish the two. Let's make our way over to GoodNotes. One of the strengths I think of GoodNotes is the fact that it has so much customization ability. You can choose what pen style you write with, what the sizes of the pen are, the colors of the pens and the highlighters, what paper you write on. I personally love writing on dotted because I don't think it distracts too much from the actual handwriting but it still kind of gives you some guidance when using a stylus which I think is really helpful especially with digital handwriting having some sort of guide makes things a little bit neater. I love love love the lasso tool on GoodNotes. You can take a piece of text and not only move it around the page but also resize it, recolor it. It's incredible because after you've written a full page of notes you can change up the entire look of it as you're going to see me do throughout the course of the next few minutes but it's such a convenient thing to have. It's something that really sets it apart from writing on physical paper because obviously once you write something down even in pencil or pen you can't just be moving it around. It's not as easy to do. I also use the shape tool quite a lot to group big pieces of text together and also as boxes for headers or subtitles that sort of thing. Adding a visual is also a great way to just kind of make a page stand out and sometimes I'll just take visuals directly from lecture slides that are provided to us because that's really easy and it's an awesome way to connect what happens in lecture to what happens in readings because you've got a picture kind of umbrella-ing them together. Of course Google also exists and is a really great resource for finding photos or diagrams for any topic subject. Since I don't always like to carry my iPad around I will always export my notes from GoodNotes to OneNote so that there's a copy that exists within OneNote and that is great because it means I also have a backed up copy somewhere else on the internet which I'm kind of obsessed with backing things up. I've gone through too many experiences where things crash and I just like to have safety measures in place. Obviously everyone has different learning styles and note-taking methods that work for them. This video isn't meant to say that there's a right way to be a student but hopefully there's some tips in here that inspire you to get excited about your note-taking whether it's digital or not. Let me know in the comments below if you yourself incorporate digital note-taking into your note-taking system. Give this video a big thumbs up if you enjoyed it and I will see you all very soon with another back to school video.