It’s helpful to think how you can make your notes portable, in case you have your best ideas on the bus or while in a completely different lecture
This is an example of Cornell notetaking. The main differences from just noting down points is that you have a left hand margin for questions and key points, then a summary section at the bottom that you can go back to when you’re revising or when you want to make use of these ideas in an assignment
Here’s an example of a mindmap created using mindmap software – but you could also draw it by hand. It can feel like a freer way of creating notes
You can create hierarchies using the Smart Art features of Powerpoint – might be helpful if you want to organise your notes into a specific structure.
These are notes created by a radiography student. They were her summary of what she’d learned that week so weren’t her original lecture notes but her key points. It was a subject she didn’t enjoy so she used bright colours to keep positive. She also said that she was a skilled typist so she could type without thinking, whereas doing it this way meant she had to consider the content. These notes are very attractive and well-thought out but it must have been time-consuming to create them – you probably wouldn’t have time to do this for all your notes.
By annotating text we mean adding notes to something that has already been created, so you’re adding notes as you’re listening or reading. These notes can be on print-outs or on online. The example on the left is from PowerPoint. Did you know that if you print out PowerPoint slides three to a page you get this option to add notes to them? If you struggle to understand what is said in a lecture, these notes could just be to highlight slides which are not clear to you.
If you are mainly a visual learner, here are some ideas for notes. You can see that we’ve used pictures for ideas. We’ve also broken up the text into smaller parts and used colour coding to link ideas. These notes were originally just text, recorded by me/one of my colleagues at a recent conference at Teesside University. It took time to turn them into something more visual, but she/I enjoyed doing it and felt that she remembered the ideas more clearly than if they’d just been words. So even if you’re not a visual learner, you might find this a useful activity to keep you motivated for example for revision of key ideas (like the example from the radiography student that we showed earlier)