This summer, I made a huge investment. I bought myself an iPad, an iPad Pro that is. To do that I had to work lots of hours at work…sometimes reaching my 40-hour maximum, but I worked at the pool, so it was enjoyable when the sun was out. You are probably asking yourself why the investment? Well, okay let me list the reasons out.
- My freshman year of college I noticed that a lot of my lectures were pre-loaded to blackboard and sometimes I was not able to copy down full diagrams or points on a slide in my notes as in detail as I wanted.
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Now, with my iPad I am able to write on all my slides and it is more of a “kinetic” type of learning because I am literally touching the slide with my Apple pen, actively highlighting words and doing any drawings I want.
- It makes it easy to switch out colors.
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Yes, I am that girl in your class who has like 20 different pen colors, what can I say, I am also a visual learner, so it is important for me to associate certain words with certain colors.
- Duplicating things is easy now.
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I can just copy and paste things! From a pre-med major stand point in a class like Organic Chemistry, where you are constantly drawing the same structure like a benzene ring over and over again, on your note taking app (I use Notability) you can just copy and post the structure over and over again, this helps me save time in taking notes in lecture.
- I am able to look up images, stickers, or gifs that relate to the subject I am learning about which help my visual way of learning.
- I do not have to worry about losing papers or order in my notes.
- It has forced me to be more organized and draw out different concept maps to help gear my studying.
- It has helped me take a step in reducing my usage of paper.
- My backpack is lighter because I am able to upload pdfs of my book and do my homework on my iPad, so my back does not hurt as much as it previously did.
I am not an Apple influencer by any means, but I recommend that if you want to try taking digital notes, try an iPad. If you do not like Apple try any tablet! As someone who likes the traditional paper and pen mechanism, I like digital note taking because how environmentally friendly it is and how advantageous it has been to my learning as listed above. Since using my iPad there has been a positive increase in my grades as well compared to freshman year.