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My Favourite Note-Taking App for Students - Notion

2020-02-28 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 24:13 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Tools, apps and tech) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali shows how he takes notes in Notion on the physiology he teaches at Cambridge, in three parts: toggles and sub-pages to keep the big picture (understanding), the Cornell method with answers hidden under question toggles and a retrospective revision timetable rated out of five (memorising), and linked databases of his students and essays (organising); he ends with his priorities for students, a first-class result last.

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: note-taking in Notion in three parts, understanding, memorising and organising

00:00:29 — Understanding: note-taking's poor evidence, toggles for the big picture, sub-pages for extra detail

  • ★★ Ali says learning anything at university has two main components: first understanding, then memorising. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Ali says note-taking itself, summarising content with the book open or from lecture notes, is by the evidence a fairly poor technique for retaining information, but a few changes can make it useful for understanding and memorising. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Ali shows his Notion setup for human physiology, a lecture series he is helping teach to medical students at the University of Cambridge. — 00:00:58 · Notion, University of Cambridge
  • ★ Ali screenshots diagrams from his lecture notes into Notion, which he says can take almost any type of content, such as text, images and PDFs, and makes it look quite pretty. — 00:02:13 · Notion
  • ★★ When taking notes on anything, Ali says, keep the big picture in mind: especially with a difficult subject it is very easy to focus only on the details. — 00:02:13
  • ★★ At medical school Ali at first made the mistake of always focusing on the details, because exams tested such minute detail, and lost the big picture; since discovering Notion he has found a good way to avoid that. — 00:02:42 · Notion
  • ★★★ Ali turns every subheading of his lecture notes into its own toggle in Notion, so he sees at a glance all the topics of a lecture and can open a toggle to dive into one. — 00:03:11 · Notion

  • ★★★ If one thing makes Notion fantastic for students, Ali says, it is its toggle feature, which hides details and which no other note-taking app has: not OneNote, Evernote, Notability or GoodNotes. — 00:03:11 · Notion, Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, Notability, GoodNotes

    “that toggle feature. And it's such a simple feature that like literally no other note-taking app has.”

  • ★★ In Notion, Ali says, extra information is easy to add without losing the big picture, while in OneNote and Evernote diving deeper into a topic he did not understand clogged up his notes. — 00:03:59 · Notion, Microsoft OneNote, Evernote

  • ★★ When detail such as the history of membrane structure clogs his lecture notes, Ali makes a new page in Notion wherever he wants and moves the material into it. — 00:05:35 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali says Notion's design helps him understand material a little better in a way no other note-taking app he has seen does. — 00:06:47 · Notion

00:07:12 — Memorising with active recall: the Cornell method in Notion toggles, and Make It Stick

  • ★★ To commit a topic to memory, Ali says, note-taking is generally middle to bottom of the pile; what works is active recall, testing yourself, and spaced repetition over time. — 00:07:12 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ In the Cornell note-taking method, which Ali says has active recall built in, you write notes on one side of the page and questions about them on the other, then cover the answers and answer the questions. — 00:08:11 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali calls passively rereading, highlighting or writing out your notes again totally pointless; notes become useful when you ask yourself questions and test yourself on the content. — 00:08:11
  • ★★★ Ali does the Cornell method in Notion with the toggle feature, which he calls the single best thing about Notion: a question as the toggle, such as how much blood the heart pumps in a lifetime, with the answer hidden inside. — 00:08:40 · Notion
  • ★★ Instead of bullet points, which most people would reread without testing themselves, Ali drags the information into a toggle under a question, so looking at his notes forces him to test himself. — 00:09:36 · Notion, active recall
  • ★★ For a question such as a labelled diagram of blood vessel structure, Ali draws the answer on paper before opening the toggle: the very attempt to recall it strengthens the memory, even when he misses parts. — 00:10:06 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali says so much research shows that getting information out of the brain, testing yourself, retains it far better than rereading it. — 00:11:07 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali cites Make It Stick, a book on the science of effective learning, whose authors, having studied hundreds of thousands of students, say that if you are not getting the results you want, you are probably not testing yourself enough. — 00:11:36 · Make It Stick

00:12:05 — Spaced repetition: the forgetting curve and his retrospective revision timetable in Notion

  • ★★ Spaced repetition counteracts the forgetting curve, which Ali says Ebbinghaus discovered in the 1800s: memory of anything learned decays exponentially over time. — 00:12:05 · spaced repetition, forgetting curve
  • ★★ Forgetting a topic a week later does not mean you are stupid, Ali says: your friends have the same problem, since forgetting what you do not revisit is an innate part of how memory works. — 00:12:05 · forgetting curve
  • ★★★ Ali's spaced repetition: do a topic on day one, again the next day, a week later and a month later; each repetition interrupts the forgetting curve and makes forgetting slower, until the topic is in long-term memory. — 00:12:42 · spaced repetition, forgetting curve
  • ★★★ Ali now keeps his retrospective revision timetable, the list of topics with the date of each repetition, in Notion, because it lets him have everything in one place. — 00:13:22 · Notion, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ In brackets after each repetition date Ali rates how well he knew the topic out of five, six if fully confident, so over time he can build his spaced repetition intervals from how hard he found each topic. — 00:14:20 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali is not a fan of a prospective revision timetable planned ahead, though Notion can make one, because it involves too much guesswork: he cannot know two months ahead what his day will look like. — 00:15:14 · Notion
  • ★★★ Each day Ali glances at his retrospective revision timetable and picks the topic he most needs, tackling those he is least comfortable with: there is no point revising nerves again at five out of five. — 00:16:00
  • ★ Ali finds Notion a pleasure to use: emojis such as stars or traffic-light dots in place of ratings add a little spice and make it more interesting. — 00:16:52 · Notion

00:17:13 — Organising: Notion templates and his linked databases of students and essays

  • ★★ Ali says he is not really a student any more: he teaches physiology and uses Notion to organise his teaching. — 00:17:13 · Notion
  • ★★ At VidCon over the weekend three different people came up to Ali and said they had started using Notion because of his videos. — 00:17:13 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali points students to Notion's library of templates, made by Notion staff and community members, which they can copy and adapt. — 00:17:43 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali keeps track in Notion of the 10 students he usually teaches on Thursday nights, listed as Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Neville, Luna, Seamus, Dean, Parvati and Cho, and of a bank of essays from past papers. — 00:18:08 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali links his Notion databases of essays and topics, so the nerves topic page shows all the essays tagged with nerves. — 00:18:51 · Notion
  • ★★ For a student's end-of-term report Ali opens that student's profile in Notion, which lists every essay the student has done. — 00:19:20 · Notion
  • ★★ Students, Ali says, can use Notion to keep track of their assignments and notes. — 00:20:07 · Notion

00:20:44 — Notion's sponsor offer of free personal plans

00:22:10 — His priorities for his students: health, passing, enjoyment, and a first last

  • ★★★ Ali tells his students at the start of term that their first priority is to stay healthy: nothing ranks higher than managing physical and mental health, especially in the intense environment of university. — 00:22:10 · Mental health
  • ★★ The second priority Ali gives his students is to pass the exam: failing one without extenuating circumstances usually means a lot of misery later, while passing makes life a lot easier. — 00:22:39
  • ★★★ Ali's third priority for his students is to understand and enjoy physiology, the degree and the university experience; getting a first comes last on his list. — 00:22:39

00:23:12 — Sign-off: from the iPad Pro guy to the Notion guy

  • ★★★ As long as his students pass, Ali would much rather they enjoy the subject, the degree and university than kill themselves competing with their year for amazing exam results. — 00:23:12
  • ★★ Once known as the iPad Pro guy, Ali says people who stop him in the street now know him as the Notion guy, which he likes because he loves Notion and uses it every day. — 00:23:41 · Notion, iPad Pro

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · Cornell note-taking · Notion · spaced repetition

Also: People: Hermann Ebbinghaus

Works: Make It Stick

Organizations: University of Cambridge

Concepts: forgetting curve · Mental health

Events: VidCon

Products: Evernote · GoodNotes · Google Sheets · iPad Pro · Microsoft OneNote · Notability

Also centred on Cornell note-taking: My Favourite Productivity App for Students - Notion · Study With Me - Weekend on-call

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