Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Guide to Note Taking in Class
Daily Infographic: Hopefully in the near future, I will be attending grad school. I need a refresher course in note taking. We have all taken notes in class at some point in our lives. Styles differs among students, but not everyone does it the right way. You positively want your notes to be useful for future reference. These tips can also apply to certain workplace situations. This infographic has some methods on how you can improve your skills.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
We recently talked about this in Basic PTM where we discussed the best way to take notes. For one, it's huge to make sure that you keep your notes hand written. It keeps you focused and makes sure you can remember something for class that day. I personally have always taken notes by hand, even if it is slower. I just seems like this a method I'm used to. Also, including you dates on your paper is very important. I always assumed that I know what I need when, but including your dates, gives you the option to collect everything from one date to the other. And documenting your work would be a lot better for you to understand. I wish this article would state a new way of taking notes, instead of just pointing out the obvious. Maybe sometime soon I will find a new way and I can share it with everyone, but for now I really like how I take notes.
I used to always take notes by hand, since I am a very tactile learner and therefore need to write out or draw out whatever I am learning. However, as time goes on, I get more and more comfortable with my keyboard and actually learn fairly well in that space between on-the-board and in-my-computer. I've found the most important thing for me when taking notes or learning in class is that I need to listen to or read every single word as opposed to just skimming. If I am copying things into my computer, I will always read every word. I realize it has been proven that handwriting is more effective, that's why my old Global Histories teacher would not allow technology in class. Typing things up on a computer just solidifies things better in my brain. It's not the process of writing each letter, but of thinking each word aloud in my head. Any issue I have with remembering things during class is processing-based, not note-taking based.
Taking good note is essential for doing well in college but what this article fails to address is that different note taking style affect people differently. We as individuals all have different learning styles and some of majority of standard note taking practices are geared to people who are heavy read write learners. For me I am a visual and kinesics learner and while I can’t always act what I am learning in class out it helps when I can draw a small fast cartoon of what it is I am trying to learn. For me because of how many of my classes are structured I have always found myself using the next level up of mapping; sketch noting. It allows me to break away from the lines given to me on the page, but still use them as guidelines, and look at my page as a blank canvas for a new and creative way of absorbing the information on the page. I am still able to abbreviate a lot of the information at times with a short picture because like the saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words. I didn’t know that by not reviewing the notes soon after taking them the information is still lost. In the future I would like to try to make time to look back at my notes but at this point in time I can make no promises.
I am currently enrolled in a Global Histories course. The professor does not allow laptops for note-taking and refuses to post his lecture powerpoints online. He does this to encourage handwritten notes and it definitely works in terms of the quality of notes written. Professor Law's strategy is definitely an effective one. But I once had a high school teacher who forced us all to write with the cornell notes style, (shown in the article) she made us set up our notes up in that way and she collected our notes and graded us on how well we fit into the cornell note style. This was not very effective because cornell notes are not very helpful for the way I learn. I got points off for not using the correct notes format which makes absolutely no sense to me.
There are a lot of great tips on note taking in that info graph, and though some of it seems obvious, or repetitive, it doesn’t make it less important. Being in a drama school, I find it easy to connect what I like to do with what I’m learning. I chose to come here because I want to one day work in this field, and I feel a strong personal connection to the work. Typically, that is where I find my motivation and my capacity for information retention. However, this only adds to my already poor practice of note taking. It has bitten me in the ass a few too many times, and so I definitely will consider these tips going in to this next fall semester. In addition to these however, many of the faculty have very good opinions on how to retain information and manage workloads. Dick always says to start something the day it’s assigned as to not forget about it, so, I will likely be trying a combination of those strategies.
Post a Comment