That College KidSync Notes is a program/website that allows you to synchronize your notes between your computer, cell phone, PDA and their website and is a great way to have your notes with you at all times. (Like you’ll actually be studying them.) It’s free and easy to use, but unfortunately is only available for PC. There is a web version, Windows client and mobile client so you can control your notes from anywhere.
Reading is an important and often endless task in college, yet most students detest it. Why? Because they’re not productive. If reading a twenty page chapter takes you forty-five minutes, then no wonder you don’t want to do it. For most classes, there’s no way around reading, so why not make sure you’re getting the most out of it?
If you’re assigned a five chapter chunk for homework, work on one chapter at a time. This doesn’t make the challenge seem endless. Also, don’t procrastinate, I know it’s hard, but if you start early and have time for breaks (a few minutes to an hour to a day), then it’s much easier.
Skim through the reading, get all the main points, headers, bold words, everything that sticks out.
Write down the big picture, either in an outline, a mind map, anything.
Once you have your notes on the important ideas, go back through and see if there’s any details you missed. Think dates, names and places, stuff that your professor might ask, but isn’t necessarily what you’d call “important” in the grand scheme of things. This is more for history, political science, and psychology classes. When you’re getting into physics or the like, this isn’t as important.
Now that you’ve got your great notes, don’t look at the book again. If you’ve gotten the important info out of if, you don’t need it anymore. Knowing that you only have to go through your book once or twice helps.
It is easier to forget something than to remember so to help yourself remember something, apply as many of the following techniques as possible.
1. Be flexible. Experiment with what helps you remember, whether it’s a mnemonic or simply adding color.
2. Overlearn. Practice and reorganize what you intend to remember in as many ways as possible. Use it while speaking and writing, even act it out. The more time you spend, the more it’s ingrained.
3. Imitate. Schedule study time to reflect the time of day when you’ll be using the material (make study time the same as test time). Create a similar environment. Study without music if the room will be quiet. Study at a desk instead of on your bed.
4. Rephrase and explain. Try role-playing. Take the view of the teacher and explain the material to someone else, your dog, or a stuffed animal. You definitely understand the material when you can teach someone else.
5. Eliminate accidental and unrelated associations. A study situation where a phone rings constantly produces breaks in the association process. If you’re singing along to Eric Clapton throughout your study session, you will relate the material to Eric Clapton. This is only helpful if your topic is indeed Eric Clapton.
6. Eliminate previous mistakes. Take note of any previous mistakes you’ve made while studying and don’t do them anymore. If music distracts you, don’t play music during your next study session.
7. Decide on order of importance. Some things are more important than others. In a particular chapter or topic, decide what’s the big picture and organize everything else around that.
8. Become emotionally involved. This doesn’t always work with schoolwork, especially if you don’t care about a particular subject. But notice how you remember things you care about. If you can somehow relate the topic to something you care about, you’ll remember it better.
Not enough people know how to properly create an outline and that amazes me. The first step is to actually understand the material you’re reading because if you’re simply taking chunks of the chapter, you’re not going to get anywhere. There are different types of outlines, there’s one that the professor wants you to hand in, outlining your research paper and there’s an outline of a chapter. This lesson is going to cover both.
This will be the guts of your paper. Once you’ve figured out your topic and the general direction of your paper, creating an outline is pretty straightforward. You really need to know your thesis before completing the outline and my suggestion if you’re confused, is to not worry about the thesis until the end. Start with the information.
Once you’ve gathered your research, you generally know the idea of what you want to talk about first. If you’re completely lost, choose the idea that would be a great opener - something that’s controversial, interesting or your audience would agree with. To choose what’s next in line, ask yourself, “After idea A, what is an easy transition?” If you’re going from dogs to VCRs, there’s probably not going to be an easy connection. Transitions between different sections can be made very simple if you choose topics that seem to flow well together. Also remember that nothing is set in stone. If later you realize you should have put topic B where topic F is, change it.
Because this article is so long, I’m going to cut it off here and allow you to view the rest of entry if you choose to do so. Read the rest of this entry »
Cal over at Study Hacks wrote a blog post on how to take notes for power point slides, which got me thinking about my note-taking strategies. I’m a great note taker, always have been, but for some people, it’s a chore. I actually enjoy taking notes because I learn the material that much faster and when the test comes, I go over my notes a few times and I’m good to go.
Cal’s suggestion for power point lectures is to download (if available) the power point and simply take your notes in the notes section of the slides instead of printing them out first. That way, after the lecture, you can print out the slides and your notes together. See his post for more details. This is a great idea, even though this semester I don’t have any professors that actually use power point. The only notes I take are for political science, the class I stopped going to (I just read the chapters and take the tests, it’s a ridiculous class).
These things work for me, but they might not work for you. What does? Do you have any strategies or tips you’d like to share?
Gearfire is publishing an article about his favorite academic programs for Windows and I’m posting a sister article for Mac users. Personally, I don’t use academic-based software that much. I do have these three applications on my computer and use them sometimes, but so far this semester, I haven’t had too many assignments or a difficult class. I use NeoOffice the most out of any program, for word processing and spreadsheets, but I also use Skim. There are other programs out there, but with my experience, these are great for students. Note taking is usually done in a text editor/word processing program anyway.
Genius is a flashcard-based application to help you memorize things. I use this, especially for political science in memorizing hoards of vocab words. It organizes info using the “Leitner “learning cardfile” system, and it quizzes you using a spaced repetition method.” Based on performance, it repeats certain words.
Schoolhouse is the homework manager for Mac. It sorts and organizes assignments, tests and projects. The smart notebook feature introduced in other Apple software is there, as well as classcasts so you can publish subscribable assignments on the web. My favorite thing about this software is the grade calculations. You can input all of your grades for each class and it keeps track of your average. It’s much better than trying to do it myself. Schoolhouse integrates a calendar/GTD program with keeping track of school work as well, which makes this an excellent tool for students.
Skim is a PDF reader (yes, I know, Preview is wonderful!) that lets you write on them so you don’t have to print out notes to take notes. I use this for my political science class (well, when I actually went to his class, I haven’t in over a month.) The professor gives us a copy of the powerpoint in pdf format and I use Skim to write all over it. It saves me from the cost of ink and paper.
I’m currently on a mission to find an organization program that I like. I’ve been looking through online apps and actual software. I want something that lets me organize my bills, schedule, tasks and school assignments. It needs to integrate well with the student part of me and the citizen part of me.
First, I tried mySchoolog. I like the way the schedule works. It’s pretty and uses Ajax so it’s nice. The one thing I don’t like about it is that sometimes it’s slow to save and load things. I think it’s overwhelmed. It has a way to integrate your grades and tasks. Another downside is it doesn’t really have a nice way to incorporate my bills.
Next I tried Vitalist. It’s just a GTD website. It’s very color-coded, which is really nice. But it doesn’t have a specific way to include my school work or schedule. It’s simply a task manager.
Does anyone have any programs or online web applications they use and recommend or know of but haven’t had a chance to try? I’m really looking to try anything, whether it’s software (Windows or Mac) or a website.
