Evernote is a great tool for note taking, and students are some of the people that take the most notes. I’ve written a post about how I use Evernote in general, and this post is about how I use Evernote to take notes.
Evernote is a great tool for taking down thoughts, web clippings, complex notes and anything else you can think of. It’s great for taking notes in lessons and lectures, and I use it simply but effectively to take notes at school.
Firstly, I have a notebook for each subject, under my school stack. This lets me organise my notes by subject and see them all in one place, and share that notebook with teachers so they can see the notes I have taken.
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| My school stack |
I title every note with the lesson title, and then the date next to it. Once again, this lets me quickly find the lessons I want so I can revise over them when I need to, and I can see the order that I took the notes in. Sorting your notes by date created also might be a useful feature – it means that you latest class will always be the note on top, and the oldest notes on the bottom. However, I leave it as latest updated, as I often update older notes with new info, or occasional spelling corrections.
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| A normal school note |
I then tag each of my notes with the subject, the year I’m in and a school tag. For example, I would tag an English note with ‘english’, ‘year11’ and ‘school’. Tagging the note with your year means that you can sort your notes by the year you took them, and get rid of old notes that don’t have any relevance. I also tag because at the end of each academic year I make a table of contents for each subject, and I move those notes to my ‘.Cabinet’ notebook. This means that only the current year of notes are in the notebook, and it doesn’t get disorganised.
The way I organise my notes means that I can always find my current notes, and that my notes don’t get clogged up with older notes. Tagging them means that I can find all the notes from the academic year I was in, and tagging them with subjects lets me refine that to just specific notes for a subject in a specific year. Using the lesson title and the date also lets me easily find the notes I want.
I use my iPad to take notes at school, and I actually automatically assign tags and the notebook according to the lesson I’m in. I also use markdown to take notes in Drafts 4, and then send them over to Evernote. If you want to read more about how I automatically tag and assign notebooks, you can check out the post about it here.
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