On thing that worked for me was recording the lesson so that I didn’t necessarily have to take notes right away and could absorb more information being told to me, have time to think about that information and ask questions in the moment. Then I could go home, re-listen to the lecture, write out some notes, and then fine tune those notes by reading the source material and other learning aids. This worked better for me especially having ADHD than trying to write notes and missing parts of the lecture as a result. Being able to take photos of the board was also useful, especially when diagrams and or visual information was being relayed.
I do think it’s important to experiment with what you have available and find strategies that work for you. Not everyone learns the same way.
pishadoot@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Studying, in its base form, follows the following steps:
-take in the information
-record the information
-review the information you’ve recorded in chunks. Best practice is to review your newly recorded information at the session, and at the start of the next session review old information. If you can review ALL your recorded information on a subject at the start of a new session that’s best - at first it’s slow but as you review a couple times you’re skimming or skipping most of it and only focus on the parts that you have trouble retaining.
With that being said, the ways we prefer to TAKE IN and RECORD information vary between people, but the overall concept does not.
In terms of flash cards, they’re great for memorization. That has not changed - it’s a base way to record and review information.
A modern version of this applies the base method but digitizes it. Anki is a very good and popular modern flash card app/program
-you can make flash cards with text, but also audio, images, and video
-you can save decks and sync them across all devices and share/upload decks
-it’s “smart.” If you spend more time struggling to answer a card, or get it wrong, it’ll show it to you more frequently. The reverse is true if you get it right every time quickly, you see it much less frequently
-it can nag you to study. You can set it up to notify you every hour, day, whatever and thrust 10-1000 cards in your face, whatever you set it to.
-tons of ways to configure it so it meets your specific needs.
So, that’s how things have modernized, for flash cards at least. But plenty of people still buy 3x5 index cards and keep a physical deck if that’s what they prefer. Again, the method isn’t as important as the process of receive/record/review.
Personally I like to use an e-ink handwriting tablet for in person note taking (all the benefits of paper/handwriting without the fuss of paper, plus lots of other features like cut/paste, linking/bookmarking items, etc) and I prefer typing into a word document when I’m studying from a book. The word document is very clean and I can use structured outlining formatting as well as a quick Ctrl+f to find terms I’ve written about. But whether it’s e-ink tablet or word doc, the base method is the same as when I was younger and it was all paper.
I think phones have their uses but they are awful for note taking. The fastest texter is much slower than writing by hand or typing, and you are so, so much more limited in underlining, highlighting, little symbols, positioning text in weird ways to symbolize things, etc. I don’t advocate that people use them unless they’re in a bind and have nothing else, but a lot of kids grow up these days and that’s their go to method because of familiarity, and we shouldn’t encourage that because it’s flat worse. However, phones can do great things such as record/transcribe, photos, videos etc - so they’re a great addition to the toolbox, but they’re not a NOTE TAKING replacement unless they’re a stylus/handwriting type, and even those are a poor cousin to a dedicated device for the purpose, but they can be a more affordable/versatile/portable version. My note writer was about $500 and that’s a lot of cheese but it was worth every penny to me because of how I use it.