If there is something that all college students tend to have in common, it’s the fact that they take notes. Everybody tends to have their own specific way that they do it and it is one of the more stressful things that may need to get done through the day. As you continue to go through your college career, you will likely have some concern over the possibility that you missed something important.
Something else that will happen as you continue your college career is the fact that you will likely get better at taking notes along the way. For some, it is a skill that they carry through their entire life and for others, it is something that they use during their college years and then quickly forget. It is more than simply typing out every single word that the professor is saying. In fact, if you try to go Word for Word, you are likely to really be frustrated over taking proper notes. If you’re interested in getting better, some students have come up with a program that may just change College forever.
It is a system that is known as collaborative notes and I’m surprised that nobody ever thought about it before. Imagine this scenario: the entire class is getting together and putting all the notes into a single system so that they can share them with each other. One person in the class may miss something but not everybody is going to miss it. In other words, you are leveraging their notes to make your notes better.
This comes from twitter user Stephanie McKellop. She found that there was a group of students in her class that would collaborate all of their notes into a single Google doc file. You can even see who is editing the document so if somebody is lagging behind or just trying to take notes without adding anything into it, you can kick them out of the program.
Stephanie pull things together in a series of tweets to explain how it works. It seems to be one of the best things that has happened to student notetaking since the pen and pencil.
After you make sure that everybody is understanding the material, you will find that the end of the semester is actually quite easy. Once you begin prepping for finals, you will have a well-organized document that contains all of the notes from multiple users through the year.
Not only does it include the basic notes, it also includes side notes and notes in the margins. I don’t know why they couldn’t have thought about something like this when I was taking notes.
Students need to pull together if they want to stay on track to graduate with good grades. It isn’t easy but with a system like this, it can help everybody to pull through successfully.