Looking at where we are as students in 2025, it is amazing to look back on the technological revolution and our experiences with them as students. It’s something pretty significant that we went through, and yet, I realized that this hasn’t been mentioned. As we live in an era where we don’t formally own our work, and leave everything up to our computer, I thought it would be best to mention the transition and ways to keep your work safe.
From filling out transparency worksheets on projector screens and watching Bill Nye on a big box television to taking notes on sleek iPads, it amazes me to see how streamlined the learning process has become. And yet, there are things that I miss about the old way of doing things. I remember in primary and middle school, we did everything strictly in notebooks and workbooks. We would spend a class session working on our notebooks, with my teachers telling us how to set it up with a table of contents and page numbers. We would submit these notebooks at the end of the unit for a grade. Same with workbooks; sometimes the pages would be ripped out, or we would write in our answers on lined paper, or the workbooks would go unused entirely. But this was a system that I liked. It was straightforward – we had a set place to take notes during class. Course delivery was completely based on the work we did in our notebooks. When middle school came around, we had this online website to check out our grades. But we got workbooks that we got to keep for the most part, along with folders to keep track of other papers. Middle school was also the time when I started using Google Drive for the first time after using early versions of Microsoft Word in elementary.
Eighth grade was when I had my first horrible experience with technology. The school had told us that by the end of the year and eighth-grade graduation, we would be losing access to our school Google Drive accounts. This meant that all of the work I’d done those three years would go down the technology drain. And yet, I had no idea how to transfer all that work. All that work and memories would be gone forever.
This experience would be in the back of my mind by the time I started high school. However, by the time I was a freshman in the year 2015, things had begun to change rapidly. Most of my classes solely relied on worksheets. I remember having papers and papers of worksheets and spending copious amounts of time filing them neatly in binders, which weighed my backpack down having to carry them to school every day. Notebooks weren’t really a thing; at least, we weren’t told to carry class notebooks anymore. Yet somehow, everyone had got the memo that notebooks were an important thing to carry. It was annoying, to say the least, to flip through worksheets and worksheets and keep having to file them in our binders. The notebook checks certainly weren’t a thing anymore either. That went on for four years. I remember we used Chromebooks and we didn’t bring our notebooks to class. The school planners that we were given felt small and stale; they weren’t effective for me. Google Calendar was starting to become the way that everyone organized their time. But for me, I didn’t adopt new technology tools until much later. Keeping track of so many papers felt like a full-time job in itself.
By the time my first year of university came around in 2019, I noticed that almost everyone carried iPads everywhere they went, and they used those iPads to take notes. Of course, the iPads back then weren’t as savvy as they are now, but this felt like a total arena for me. For someone who had the Cornell method of taking notes drilled into her mind and had purchased notebooks, this felt like a new way of doing school. But of course, I didn’t have anyone telling me or giving me advice on what to do. And during the pandemic, of course, I had no one to look to for what kinds of technology they were using. The Covid transition to online learning was challenging in the fact that we quickly had to adapt to a fully online landscape without much instruction. Although it wasn’t hard to figure out, what was challenging was discovering and recovering all of these new technology tools and figuring out the system best for me. The system that we had grown up with was no more. Notes, classwork, homework, and other worksheets and attachments were all over the place; some floating around on my desktop, lying on an external hard drive, on my personal Google Account, and more work on other technology tools. Being organized quickly shifted from keeping track of loose-leaf papers to rapidly figuring out how to organize these files online. I even remember friends telling me that there were files that they didn’t care to download because of them crowding their laptop space.
It took some time to get used to the online landscape. As technology grew and we suddenly found almost every aspect of our lives online, it took a while to get used to spending hours and hours on the computer. As someone who loved doing things on paper, it also grew tiresome having to constantly spend money on printer ink and printing things out every week. So it almost became a Catch-22 situation, and it made me wonder how everyone was managing their organizational skills. As students when we didn’t receive much instruction besides finding a system that works for you.
The technology transition won’t stop here, and students will continue having to find ways to stay organized online. Here’s a list of tips that I found helped me navigate this transition in uni:
Notebooks or line paper – It’s helpful to have at least one – studies have found that doing things on paper helps to retain information. Notebooks also help with taking notes online. It’s also helpful to have a go-to notebook where you need to jot something down.Have a personal account where you can save things. Chances are, there are many important documents on your school account (which you will be losing access to when you graduate!). These documents may play a role in the future when applying for jobs, working on your portfolios, or preparing for interviews. Always keep copies in a place where you can easily access them.
- Notebooks or line paper – It’s helpful to have at least one – studies have found that doing things on paper helps to retain information. Notebooks also help with taking notes online. It’s also helpful to have a go-to notebook where you need to jot something down.
- Have a personal account where you can save things. Chances are, there are many important documents on your school account (which you will be losing access to when you graduate!). These documents may play a role in the future when applying for jobs, working on your portfolios, or preparing for interviews. Always keep copies in a place where you can easily access them.
- Hard drives: it helps to have one with at least two terabytes of storage. Consider exporting work to a hard drive at least twice a year.
- Have good tech: for me, the MacBooks have given me optimal internet access, and yet I still struggle with turning in things on Canvas because of how much time and effort it takes to find downloaded files. I would recommend having technology from multiple brands – user experience is better with some devices than others.
- Sticking with your system: it’s hard to do this when there are so many alternatives available at your fingertips. This is why it’s important not to get stuck in the process. Of course, every semester is different, which is why we need to constantly find new ways of taking notes, downloading files, etc. So for each semester, stick to the one that works best for you.
- Make your online space pretty! There are so many available plugins and extensions that you can use to help you stay on track.
- Save the link for when you have issues with tech so that you can immediately go get tech help.
- Consider having physical notebooks for creative work. Saving creative work in a cloud-based system opens risk to security issues. Or, make sure to export creative work to hard drives as soon as possible.
As we navigate this exciting yet difficult transition and technology grows more advanced, remember that paper is a resource that’s always available to you.
Do you have any tips to share regarding your organization system? Let us know @HerCampusSJSU!