Plug it in, plug it i

BEFORE


AFTER






NOTE TAKING
A daunting task indeed. The professor flied through the class lecture and you're stuck there, chasing to catch up on what your teacher is saying as quickly as you can.
HOW DO WE KEEP UP? HOW DO WE TAKE EFFECTIVE NOTES ON TIME?

I'm going to teach you a step by step method to ace the horrors to taking notes.
This strategy is called Plug-In-Notes!

Firstly, we're going to assume you're taking notes on your laptop. Be it, PC or Mac, you can go into Microsoft Word and format your page for a "Notebook" layout. This presentation represents a real, paper notebook. You can now add pictures, audio recordings, or visual graphs, in this nice format of a note-taking page.

Next, TAKE YOUR NOTES. Be as aware as possible to take down specific notes and important key terms your teacher announces. For example, in my Human Sexuality Study Guide I made for this Plug-In-Notes strategy, I took note of the key terms and specific concepts my teacher announced in his lecture.

After Class, you're going to group together certain topics that are alike and create a graphic organizer.
This is so you're notes are in a nice, visual, clear format so you can easily review them at a later point in time.

Being a visual learner, this strategy really helped me visualize all my notes I took from class. This is not done yet though; the most important and beneficial part comes next.

Lastly, we're going to create a series of 5 to 10 questions that we answer in our lecture notes. This is similar to the Jeopardy Note-Taking strategy. This time, we have plugged in notes and created questions that we can anticipate our teacher will ask on an exam. They are logically based off of class notes, common sense, and the class syllabi.

This strategy really helped me out for my Human Sexuality class. The lecture is very fast-paced and, while there are powerpoint presentations, they usually just include pictures; the teacher talks to tell us about the content on the visual slides. In class, I would take notes as quickly as I could, but making a study guide in an orderly manner like I did above using the PLUG-IN-NOTES strategy really helped me to see everything spread out in an organized manner. My before and after pictures really show how different my original notes and my Plug-In notes are.

I recommend this strategy to any student who has trouble anticipating test questions and organizing their notes in a nice, clear, visual manner so they can later review them after class.