By Kelly Kim
Staff Writer
It comes as no surprise that with technology, there are multiple different ways in which someone can utilize it to help them with school. It is pretty standard these days for students to own a laptop or computer of some sort to further aid them in their studying and learning.
After years of trying different studying methods, I have come to learn that a mixture between using technology and manual note taking have helped me immensely and effectively depending on the type of studying or learning I want to do.
When I break it down to the types of learning I do, there is studying and note taking. In high school, there were never any intense notes that were given out that required the use of a laptop to keep track of. For most of my high school career, I utilized many MUJI wide ruled notebooks, Pilot 0.7 gel pens and Mildliner highlighters to help me both focus and differentiate the notes I took in all my classes.
It ended up proving beneficial during Advanced Placement season, as handwriting all the notes I took throughout the year felt as though I was repeating the information back to myself as I studied.
By the time I was nearing the end of my senior year of high school and entering my freshman year of college, I saw a more dire need for my iPad, a resource that I was very fortunate to have but never really used.
I was fortunate enough to be gifted an iPad by my parents during my junior year of high school, an early gift for college as my dad phrased it. At first, I didn’t see the need or use for an iPad and thought it was one of those “rite of passage” gifts where my mom associated an iPad with college simply because she saw other moms give the same thing to their children.
However, I still felt guilty that I wasn’t utilizing the iPad to its fullest potential and thought that if I couldn’t use it during high school, what are the odds that I’ll even use it in college?
Turns out I had nothing to worry about because my iPad ended up being one of the most essential tools I have needed to survive these past few weeks in college. Not only is it so much easier to download any articles or readings in the four classes I am in, but the digital aspect simplifies things by allowing me to highlight, write or even insert images to assigned readings.
The note taking app Good Notes has treated me like a friend these past few weeks in keeping me organized and making my life simpler with its infinite amount of pages and notebooks that it provides and its helpful features like the highlighter, cutting and pasting notes from one page to another page, and downloading documents as different files to be shared with others.
I also find it helpful that I can store all of my notes without the fear of running out of room or paper, and can condense all the information I have taken for a class into one space. Good Notes overall keeps me uniform and less stressed in any time of mess.
Though I have become someone who combines the pen and paper method with the digital influences of the iPad and computer, ultimately everyone has their own rhythm and preferences when it comes to studying and so long as one finds a rhythm and works, students can do whatever they please if it means surviving and passing college in the end.
