How I Take Notes with My iPad Pro in Lectures (Notability & GoodNotes) Free Template

you know the biggest misconception I've noticed people have of me when they've seen the notes that I make is that they think I have this incredible magical ability to take things like lecture slides and textbooks that may seem uninformed them into these wonderfully presented aesthetically pleasing summaries that I used to learn and they think that I can do all of this in just one step and I'm here to tell you today that that is an absolute lie there is a middle step and it's big and it's chaotic and it's messy and it's not the sort

of thing that people would normally show on YouTube or Instagram to show up studying but that my friends is says video also I made a new intro [Music] good evening everyone on this fine evening welcome back to another video if you're here for the first time welcome it is lovely to have you my name is Samuel I'm a third-year university student and today I'm gonna show you how I take notes in lectures side note in the perfect reality where you are the perfect student who's enthusiastic with the perfect lecturer who has the perfect slides and

it communicates well this video is sort of pointless but I think we all know that most of the time and by most I mean 99.99% of the time things just aren't as simple as they should be and that's kind of shaped the way that I approach lectures for the past few years in university and so I thought the best way to communicate today's video is actually to give you three different examples of notes that I've taken inside lectures and how the approach changes depending on the type of content I'm learning but before we go on

I think it's important to go into the things I take with me when I walk into a lecturer so back in my first year of university or the Stone Age as I like to call it I used to have a printed out set of lecture slides with me which I used to annotate with my highlighters and different color pens and I would also have a notebook with me which I'd write an extra set of additional notes and to this day nothing has changed apart from the fact that now it's all digitized now I have my

lecture slides downloaded and stored on my iPad in an app called notability for those of you who haven't heard before so within the app I basically have all the tools I need to highlight and annotate the slides now alongside notability a lot of the times I have another app on the iPad known as good notes open and it sort of acts as a notebook work and jot down notes separate to the lecture slides by the way I use black paper I absolutely love black paper a lot of people have been asking about it and so

I have linked it down in the description for free free download and you're welcome all right so now I think we should move on to the first lecture that I want to talk about and that is cardiology for those of you have no idea what cardiology means it's basically a part of the physiology course and it means the heart quick story the year before my year cardiology was actually a huge lecture I think it was I think was like a hundred and twenty slides and it was so big that the students in the university complained

and the next year they split up that one lecture into two lectures and they got rid of another lecture and I still thought that even after they split it up that half a cardiology lecture was too much to be learning inside one lecture and I knew that I did not have the ability to just sit back in my chair and passively absorb all this information being thrown at me for two hours straight and so I decided to do something that was a little unusual to the students around me I actually decided to write down all

the questions that popped into my head as I was going to this lecture and I got to admit it made me feel really dumb but I knew that it was better than coming out of the lecture with nothing as far as I said I basically wrote every question that came into my head what is the aortic valve what is the difference between the pulmonary and systemic circuit why are the walls of the left ventricle much thicker than the walls of the right ventricle what are the two types of cells found in the heart how does

the heart supply itself with blood what is an action potential what is an ECG what on earth is a ventricle I actually knew that at the time but um and so I spent the entire lecture just doing that and I tried to understand what I could but I wasn't too fussed about coming out with all the answers and absorbing all the information because I'd worked out by that point that identifying what I don't know or asking questions was the secret to learning so immediately after lecture I actually found a friend and I spent 15 to

20 minutes just quickly going over the lecture again and trying to see is there any way I can break this thing down further and you know what's really cool I actually realized that I could group a lot of these questions that I had into certain categories for example I was able to group the first few questions that I had under the title of general anatomy of the ha the next section I titled pulmonary verse cardiac circuit types of cells found in the heart action potentials which are these electric impulses that control your heartbeat and I

did this all the way to the end where I finally had how the brain regulates heart rate once I had all these questions categorized aligning with different parts of the lecture I actually felt like I was in control and there was something I could do about it I've said this before but having these questions is almost like having a map a map to guide you when you're studying because you know what you're looking for you know what you don't know and that's the most important thing because later that evening I came home and I knew

where to start and I knew where I was going and I remember taking out my questions and my lecture slide and asking myself can I find the answers to my questions on my lecture slide and if the answer was no or even yes but I don't understand I would go to another resource like Google or the textbook because you see all the information you need is out there and it's available all you need is the right questions to access them and I remember in this specific scenario I ended up watching I think like 10 Khan

Academy videos in a row - crash course videos and what I started to realize was things started to make a better sense I had bits and pieces of information from Khan Academy from the lecture slides from the textbook from crash course and I took some screenshots from crash course and I had diagrams for my lecture slides and they were all scattered all around the place and it was at this point where I realized I need somewhere where I can put all these things I need somewhere where I can bring all this information together and make

it into one coherent story for lack of a better word was then where I decided to start making notes you know what's really cool if I pull out my cardiology lecture notes that I ended up making the questions that I asked while I was inside the lecture actually ended up lining up with the notes that I made for example I had questions about the general anatomy of the heart so as you can see I dedicated a section of my notes to the anatomy and I actually took a screenshot from crash course because I really liked

the diagram and I annotated it myself and just doing that helped me understand the parts of the heart then I dedicated a part to the different circuits of the heart a whole page two action potentials as I was talking about with my questions earlier an entire page on electrophysiology so how does that electrical impulse and action potential how does that move through the heart and how does that relate to what we call ECG or an electrocardiogram how does it relate to that and with the ECG I drew out each phase of the ECG in multiple

steps and the process of doing that and comparing that with the diagram of the heart right next to it actually made me understand what the ECG was representing on this particular page here I've got the cardiac cycle and all I do on this page was just copy out a section of the textbook that addressed all the questions I had regarding the cardiac cycle and just the process of copying it out the each line by itself actually enabled me to see how these different things line up and connect so it's really interesting here is the process

of making these notes so right from the start taking a lecture and breaking it down through asking questions finding multiple sources out there like Khan Academy crash course the textbook the lecture slides to answer those questions and bringing them together into one location which is my notes that I've made that process taught me everything I needed to know about this lecture and then when it came to revising all I needed to do was pull out my list of questions that I'd made inside the lecture and test myself what I'm trying to say there is there's

a process and there's a bit of a messy process and it starts off at the lecturer and I let my curiosity take over and when I let my curiosity take over everything becomes a chaotic mess and making notes is a form of bringing order and structure to all my thoughts and so in that sort of circumstance you can see the benefit of note making so someone out there might be wondering are you trying to tell me that this method of studying and learning is gonna work with every single subject I ever do in my entire

life and the answer is absolutely not I shall explain but in order to explain it we need to move on to the second lecture that I wanted to talk about today and that is pistol for those of you who do not know what histology means it's just a fancy word for tissue and by tissue I mean tissue in the body not the tissue you blow your nose on so right from the start I just started to write down as many questions as I could possibly think of and I realized about half an hour into the

lecture that I just had too many questions that were just all over the place there was no structure and you know I was actually getting lost in the questions that I was asking and I remember taking a step back and asking myself what is this election actually about what are they actually trying to teach us and then after a few minutes I started to realize that the whole point of this lecture was to classify the different types of tissue found inside the body and the moment that I identified that it was something to do with

classification I still remember thinking tree diagram I should use a tree diagram because I remember seeing someone on YouTube once use the tree diagram to organize information I thought this is the perfect opportunity and so I started doing my tree diagram so up the top I had tissue and at that time I actually didn't even know what tissue was so I asked myself what is tissues like what is the actual definition and then I went through the lecture slides during the lecture and I realized oh there's four types of tissues first type of tissue muscular

tissue now I knew what that was at that time second type connective tissue and I assumed that connective tissue connected stuff but I still put a question mark next to it because I wasn't sure next type of tissue epithelial tissue and at that time I had no idea what that was so I put a question mark next to it and then after that there was neural tissue and I knew what neural tissue was because I knew it had to do with the brain and some of the other tissue types found in the body it's a

right from the start I've established if there are four different tissue types and I remember asking myself what makes them different both structurally and functionally and then after that I went into the sub branches underneath those main branches for example I went to the lecture slides that talked about muscular tissue and then I realized there are three types of muscular tissue skeletal muscle which is attached to your bones in your body second type was cardiac muscle which is the muscle found in your heart thirdly something known as smooth muscle and at the time I had

no idea what smooth muscle was so I put a question mark next to it and as I was doing this I was simultaneously asking myself how are these three different muscular tissues different in terms of location function cell structure shape etc and I just kept continuing this process for the rest of the lecture in fact I spent another 20 to 30 minutes after the lecture polishing up this tree diagram as you can see I was able to take the structure that was underlying that lecture and visually represent it inside that tree diagram now you might

be wondering how is a tree diagram a visual representation if it doesn't have drawings in it but I believe that you don't need drawings to be a visual learner just organizing information in a visual way and orienting it in space in such a way actually forces your mind to see the connections between things because what's really interesting is that a week after we actually had a laboratory session where we had to look at all these different tissue types and what's really interesting is the fact that when it came to doing that when I was looking

at those tissue types I was seeing them through the lens of this tree diagram and taking this a step further the main assessment that semester for this particular piece of content was a in lab exam where we had to identify microscopic images of these different types of tissues so me and a group of friends actually got together and using this tree diagram as a map once again we made a worksheet in which we took all these images and organize them according to this tree diagram and we created little white rectangles in which we could write

the answers in and we use that to revise for that exam and what I'm hoping that you see with this is that there isn't just one way there's more than one way to sort of round up this video and to give you something that you can take away in a nutshell I think there's two things you can take from this video - firstly there's always a process and that process is always more than just one simple step and with all the examples I show today it always started off with me taking a lecture and breaking

it down asking questions and then I needed to find the relevant answers and information that answers those questions and then I needed to put it all back together in my own way and a lot of the times the way that I do that is by making notes but you don't need to make notes you can do what you need to do in fact for some subjects making notes it might even be a silly thing if you do a subject like in mathematics the best way to put things together is actually to apply your knowledge and

do more questions if you do a subject like history or modern history and you need to synthesize an argument the best way to do that is actually to write an essay but the same principles apply in the process it's all about breaking things down and building things up so that's point number one point number two the way you break things down really depends on what you want to do everyone's always asking me Samuel how did you develop your note-taking a method how did you learn to break things down how did you come up with your

method and the honest answer is there is no a method there is an approach that's built around questions but it's always about adapting based in the subject so I was doing cardiology and I wrote out a list of questions because at that time that was the best way that I thought I could approach it in pathology I made a tree diagram because that was the best way for me to visualize what I was learning you see in each scenario I chose a note-taking method that I found to be the best fit for what I was

learning and so what I recommend to you is go out there find different note-taking methods try them out and see what is the best way to break down the things that you're learning so just to round off the video I thought I might have to say that everything starts with your curiosity it's your willingness to trust that ability that you have inside of you to break things down and I think a lot of people see me using the iPad and they think that that if they just had an iPad everything would just click and they'd

start learning properly but that's not true at all you need to take ownership of your learning you need to drive that process and once you start doing that yes the iPad is an incredible tool it allows you to do some of the most incredible things ever but it starts inside of you and so I hope that today's video sort of shows you some of the different ways that you can approach lectures but not just that and I also hope it sort of inspires you to try something different for once and you know you never know

you might end up and join the process so that's about it for today's video I hope you really enjoyed it if you have questions please leave them down in the comments below thank you for watching also don't forget free download link for black paper in the description I think that's about it thank you for watching if you're still watching and I will see you in the next video [Music]