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Studyblr - How To Take Good Notes
23:00Hello Everyone! Today I am going to talk about a topic that I just learned myself in the last two years. It is quiet important ...
Hello Everyone!
Today I am going to talk about a topic that I just learned myself in the last two years. It is quiet important not only for school but also for for life, I think. So I will give my best now to show you how to take good notes for school, college, or other important things when you have to write something down you need to remember.
Before we start we need to understand why we make notes: We make them so we are later able to study for our exams, make concepts in our minds and easier to understand (for ourselves) later on at home.
There is definitely no right way nor wrong way on how to take notes because we are all different and there are many ways to do so. I will tell you what works best for me and if you can relate maybe you pick some of my habits up as well.
1. Organization - Be prepared in class
Every year I have a big binder where I put all the different folders from each subject. This keeps everything together.
Each topic of the subjects get their own chapter in this folder under their category. This helps me not get confused and I always know where everything belongs.
When I head into class I will always have the binder from the current topic with me, 4 highlighters and my pencil case with pens, whitrrs, etc. as well as my note book.
Now to the actual notes, whilst in school I always write down the sub heading of each lesson and the date. For me this is important to focus, I know where I am at and what my notes are about in one look.
2. Listen Good
In class I mostly try to focus and listen to what the teacher tells me. Sometimes they give little hints and I can take side notes. Talking to my neighbor is distracting because your attention is not where it belongs to. Turn you phone off or put it far away in your bag, social media can wait those 2 hours, the world is not going to die!
So while listening I try to write down as much as I can that I think is important or helpful. My writing is not the best at that point, writing beautiful at this point is not needed!
After class I always, always try to read through the notes and highlight the keywords, headlines etc, so I am able to see what is going on at home.
This also is the first step to revision, in this little time space you actually start processing they information and it may be easier to remember when actually revising.
3. Review and Edit your Notes.
Now when at home I will go through my notes one more time. The actual work starts now because I know myself, I learn while writing and seeing the letters. As my notes look rather messy in class, I will write everything down again!
Here I will use a structure that helps me remember better, lots of symbols like arrows, bubbles, colours and drawings. This also makes learning more fun but my brain remembers those items and makes connections to topics and concepts a lot easier.
I use short terms, no full sentences ( I will use those when revising though!) to have the compact matter wrapped up in a couple of my own words. This makes me get familiar to the topic also and I can relate to the context much more.
As this step might seem rather dull to you, it helps me to revise as well. I write it down, care for the topic and am focused on it again. I revise again and in the end I do not need to study as hard anymore the night before a test because I have been constantly dividing my time to revise beforehand. Gave my brain breaks in-between to process and there is a good chance to remember it for longer as well.
Tip #6: Review, edit, and organize your notes – After class, it is a good idea to review your notes and make any edits necessary. Oftentimes, notes become messy and disorganized because you are trying to keep up with the professor during the lecture. It is worth the additional time to rewrite your notes in a more organized way. Also, research any terms or concepts you didn’t completely understand during the lecture. Additionally, in order to protect the content you’ve spent hours creating, you’ll need to keep your notes in an organized, safe place. Clearly label the binder or folder you are using for each class. If you are taking notes on your laptop, create a backup file on a zip drive in case your computer crashes the night before a test. Regardless of whether you take handwritten or electronic notes, you should date your notes and reference any chapters in your textbook that your notes correspond to for easy lookup later on.
