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How I take notes on my iPad Pro in medical school - Cambridge University medical student

2018-06-02 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 13:55 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Tools, apps and tech) · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing

Ali, a final-year Cambridge medical student, explains why he takes notes on an iPad with the Apple Pencil, combining handwriting's retention with typing's search and sync, recommends the cheaper 2018 iPad and the Notability app (OneNote on Windows), and shows how he uses it in lectures, with handouts, in clinics, for PDFs, sheet music and video plans.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Introduction and the three parts of the video

  • ★★★ Ali takes notes on an iPad with the Apple Pencil because he thinks it combines the advantages of handwritten and typed notes and removes the disadvantages of both. — 00:00:36 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali says there is a lot of evidence that handwriting your notes increases retention compared with typing them up. — 00:00:36

00:00:48 — iPad versus handwritten versus typed notes

  • ★★ Because handwriting is slow, Ali says, you have to be selective in what you write down, so you distil the lecture and actually use your brain to make the notes. — 00:01:19
  • ★★ Handwriting leaves you with reams of paper: Ali's friends who handwrite admit they rarely look at their handwritten notes because they are hard to find. — 00:01:19
  • ★★ Typed notes are accessible and synced, but with a fast typing speed, Ali says, you just transcribe what the lecturer says and take little in. — 00:01:48
  • ★★ In his first year Ali typed perfect copies of lectures, including the lecturer's ums and ahs, without taking anything in. — 00:01:48
  • ★ Even when he was not transcribing word for word, Ali found his typed lecture notes a bland mix of prose and bullet points. — 00:02:18
  • ★★ The iPad's main disadvantage is its price; the budget 2018 iPad supports the Apple Pencil and costs about half as much as the iPad Pro. — 00:02:47 · iPad Pro

00:03:16 — iPad Pro versus the 2018 iPad with Apple Pencil

  • ★ Ali bought his iPad Pro the year before (2017). — 00:03:16 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali says the only differences are that the iPad Pro is slightly more powerful and has a smaller gap between pencil and screen, so writing feels more like paper. — 00:03:16 · iPad Pro
  • ★★★ For taking notes at school or university, Ali would probably recommend the 2018 iPad rather than the 2017 iPad Pro; most YouTube videos he has seen say its larger pencil-to-screen gap is noticeable only to digital artists. (hedged) — 00:03:50 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali plans to borrow a friend's 2018 iPad for a full comparison with his iPad Pro, and will hurry it along if viewers ask for it in the comments. — 00:03:50 · iPad Pro

00:04:19 — Notability versus OneNote

  • ★★★ Ali calls Notability the best note-taking app for the iPad if your laptop or desktop is a Mac; it is not available on Windows, so Windows users should use something like OneNote. — 00:04:19 · Notability, iPad Pro
  • ★ Ali has heard very good things about OneNote: it is very powerful on Windows and less good on Mac. — 00:04:19
  • ★★ Notability's dividers with subjects inside them are intuitive, Ali says, because that is how handwritten notes are naturally split into folders. — 00:04:48 · Notability
  • ★ Ali likes Notability's many colours for writing and highlighting. — 00:04:48 · Notability
  • ★★ Notability integrates with Google Drive and Dropbox; since all of Ali's life is on Google Drive, he imports PDFs from it straight into Notability. — 00:05:18 · Notability
  • ★★ Ali prefers Notability to OneNote because it limits you to pages, which suits people used to paper, while OneNote's infinite canvas lets notes sprawl. — 00:05:47 · Notability
  • ★★ Ali says sharing notes is really important, especially in medical school, where everyone should be collaborating and sharing their notes. — 00:05:47
  • ★★ To share notes from Notability Ali exports a PDF and sends it; sharing OneNote drives never worked for him, and OneNote exported oddly shaped, unreadable PDFs. — 00:06:16 · Notability
  • ★★ Of the note-taking apps, Ali has tried only OneNote, Notability and Evernote, and he loves Notability the most. — 00:06:16 · Notability
  • ★★ Notability has worked for Ali for about the last four years and he has not looked back. — 00:06:45 · Notability
  • ★★ Ideally, Ali says, students should pre-read the lecture notes or slides to get the broad subheadings and write them at the top of the note, though most, including him, do not. — 00:06:45

00:06:54 — Taking notes in lectures: a radiology revision lecture

  • ★★ Taking notes during a lecture, focused on understanding it and distilling it into pretty notes, engages Ali's brain enough to keep him awake. — 00:07:25
  • ★★ In Notability Ali takes photos during a lecture and adds them to his notes: in a radiology revision lecture for finals he photographed the chest X-rays shown and annotated them. — 00:07:25 · Notability

00:08:31 — Taking notes in seminars with handouts

  • ★★ Ali dislikes handouts because he loses them and they get crumpled in his bag; he has gone completely paperless. — 00:08:39
  • ★★ For a small-group session with a seven-page handout, Ali scanned it with the free Scannable phone app, turned it into a PDF, AirDropped it to his iPad and filled it in within Notability. — 00:08:39 · Notability, iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali finds the iPad really good for making notes in real life, especially in clinical settings such as observing a GP consultation. — 00:09:09 · iPad Pro

00:09:27 — Notes in clinical settings and split-screen mode

  • ★★ When a patient mentions a condition he does not know, Ali writes it down and looks it up in Safari in split-screen mode next to his notes. — 00:09:38 · Notability
  • ★★ Ali drags and drops text and images from the web page straight into his Notability note and can box or highlight them there. — 00:10:03 · Notability
  • ★★ In the workplace an iPad is much better than a phone, Ali says: a phone looks rude, as if you are texting, while writing on an iPad with a pencil looks more professional. — 00:10:44 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Notability is really good for storing and annotating PDFs of books, Ali says: a multiple-choice question book can be answered on the iPad without ruining it. — 00:10:44 · Notability, iPad Pro

00:11:07 — Annotating PDFs of books

00:11:41 — Annotating sheet music

  • ★★ Ali has recently started learning to read music on the piano, keeps downloaded sheet music as PDFs sorted by genre, and is learning Jarrod Radnich's (as heard) version of Pirates of the Caribbean. — 00:11:42
  • ★★ Because he is not good at reading music, Ali writes the names of the notes and chords on his sheet-music PDFs in Notability, which helps him learn. — 00:12:12 · Notability
  • ★★ Ali uses Notability as a general note app: each YouTube video idea gets its own document, and he started the plan for this video on 24 February 2018. — 00:12:12 · Notability
  • ★★ Ali likes handwriting notes because it encourages him to make more of them; typing things out is quite boring, while boxes and pretty pages make him do it. — 00:12:12

00:12:16 — Notes for day-to-day life and video ideas

  • ★★★ Ali thinks the iPad is worth having for that alone if it encourages you to take more and better notes about ideas and day-to-day life. — 00:12:50 · iPad Pro

00:13:03 — Wrap-up and sign-off

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Mentioned

Central: iPad Pro · Notability

Only in the description or credits: University of Cambridge

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