How I take notes on my iPad Pro in medical school - Cambridge University medical student

Transcription

Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Ali. I'm a final year medical student at Cambridge University, and today we're going to be talking about how I take notes using the iPad and the Apple Pencil. In terms of structure, this video is going to be split up into three parts. In the first part, I'm going to talk about why I use the iPad at all as like a hybrid method of note-taking versus handwriting or typing up notes. In the second part, we'll talk about exactly which iPad I use, which one I'd recommend, and then I'll talk a bit about the app Notability that I use and why I use it. And in the final bit of the video, we'll talk about exactly how I take notes in lectures and if I have a handout and various different use cases and I'll show you how I use Notability. As usual, everything's going to be time-stamped in the description below, so if there's bits of the video that you'd like to skip, you can just skip to the appropriate section of the timestamps. But now, let's just jump into it and let me explain why I use the iPad at all for taking notes. So, the way I see it, there are broadly two ways of making notes. You can either handwrite your notes using pen and paper and like nice colors and highlighters and stuff, or you can type the notes up using an app like OneNote or Evernote and kind of type the notes up on your laptop as a lecture is happening. The reason I use the iPad and the Apple Pencil is because I think both these methods have the disadvantages and the iPad and Apple Pencil method combines the advantages of both and eliminates the disadvantages. So, handwriting is quite good because there's a lot of evidence that if you handwrite your notes, that increases retention versus typing them up. When you handwrite your notes, you can kind of categorize the topic into spider diagrams. You can use different colors, you can draw arrows, you can draw boxes. You can do all these things that mean that you're processing more of the lecture and distilling it into the important bits in your handwritten notes. The fact that handwriting is quite slow also means you have to be selective in what you put down, which means you're more inclined to distill and actually use your brain to make the notes. Obviously, the disadvantage of handwriting is that you end up with reams and reams of paper. And I've got a lot of friends who handwrite their notes and they admit that actually they don't really look at their handwritten notes very often because, you know, they're quite hard to find. You've got to go through and grab your ring binder file from your bookshelf, you've got to open it up, you've got to find the right page. It's just very cumbersome to deal with handwritten notes kind of in the long term. Typing your notes up solves this problem of accessibility. Everything's all in one place, everything is synced across all your different devices. The problem with typing that I find is that, especially if you've got quite a fast typing speed, and I imagine most of you watching this video will because we've all grown up with computers. If you have a fast typing speed, you can just like transcribe what the lecturer is saying and you tend up not really taking much in. So, I used to do this in first year and I'd find that I'd make a perfect copy of what the lecturer said, including all the kind of idiosyncrasies, the ums and ahs, but not really have taken anything in and I have to read through like a 10-page document of like, you know, an annoying transcription of the lecture to actually get what I wanted to say. Even when I wasn't transcribing the lecture kind of word for word, I found that the notes that I would take while typing would just be kind of a little bit of prose, a few bullet points, a bit of prose, a few bullet points. And it was just quite a not very appetizing thing to do, like to look through the lecture notes and to add stuff to it. It was just a bit bland. So that's why I didn't like typing up stuff. Now, the reason I use the iPad and the Apple Pencil is because I think it combines these and you get the best of both worlds with handwriting, like you handwrite your notes on the app that I use, Notability, and you also have all the search and sync functionalities that make typing notes really effective. Obviously, the main disadvantage of the iPad is that it's quite expensive. Uh, this is an iPad Pro. Uh, the new budget 2018 iPad does have Apple Pencil support and it does solve some of the problems because it's about half the price of the iPad Pro. But if you're a student and you've got a very tight budget, then this is probably going to be the most limiting factor. That's the price. But if you're thinking of getting an iPad, if you've got an iPad, if you're getting one for graduation or anything like that, then I think you might want to watch the rest of this video because hopefully I'll be giving you some tips on how I use Notability to take notes in various different scenarios. So, let's talk about now about which iPad I'd recommend. Um, as I said, this is the iPad Pro. Uh, I'll put the prices over here as of kind of today. This is the iPad Pro. It has Apple Pencil support. I bought it last year. But Apple recently released a 2018 iPad as well, which has Apple Pencil support and is about half the price of the iPad Pro. So, the only difference between the iPad Pro and the iPad is that the Pro is slightly more powerful and the Pro has a slightly decreased distance between the pencil and the screen or like the screen and the the thing so that it feels a little bit more like you're writing on paper, whereas with the 2018 iPad, you have a little bit of a gap. Uh, most videos that I've seen on YouTube say that you don't really notice this gap with the 2018 iPad unless you're like a digital artist. So, if you're just buying an iPad to take notes, uh, in school or at university, I'd probably recommend the 2018 iPad rather than the 2017 iPad Pro. The 2018 iPad is about half the price of the iPad Pro. But at some point, I'm going to borrow one of my friends' 2018 iPads and we're going to do like a full-on comparison. So, if you'd like to see that, let me know in the comments and I'll expedite the process of that happening. So, by this point, we've got an iPad. Uh, now, what app do I use? Uh, the app I used, as I said, is called Notability. And I think Notability is the best note-taking app for the iPad, provided you have a Mac OS device that you use as your laptop or your desktop. The problem with Notability is that it's not available on Windows, which means if you are using Windows, you should probably use something like OneNote. I've heard very good things about OneNote, and OneNote for Windows is very powerful. OneNote for Mac is less good. But for the rest of this video, we're going to be talking about Notability and why I like it. So, one of the reasons why I like it is that it gives you a good structure uh to structure your notes in. So, you get dividers and you get within dividers, you get subjects. So, depending on the layout of your course, depending on kind of how you want to organize things, that's quite an intuitive way of doing it because it's how we naturally uh split things up when we're doing handwritten notes into dividers, like folders, and then subjects within that. Secondly, Notability is nice because you have lots of different colors that you can highlight stuff in. You can you can write in like a nice shade of blue, you can highlight in like a nice shade of pink. So, like I quite enjoy writing in this kind of little dark blue. Hello. And then if you want to highlight, you can use green, which is quite fun. I also like the fact that Notability integrates nicely with Google Drive and Dropbox. So, because all of my life is on Google Drive and I want to import a PDF, it's very easy to import straight into Notability from Google Drive. You just click the import button and you can import it directly from Google Drive as a PDF. Also, if I'm scanning something, like a document on my iPhone using Scannable, uh the app, I can convert that to a PDF and AirDrop it to my iPad, open straight up in Notability. It's quite a seamless process from getting notes in real life or in PDF format into Notability itself. And also, another reason I like Notability over OneNote is because Notability restricts you to writing on pages. The problem I found with OneNote is that it gives you like an infinite horizontal and vertical canvas, which means your notes can span like a huge amount of space. And that does have its uses, but I think because we're all used to writing on paper, I think the fact that Notability limits you to writing in different pages uh is really helpful. It's helpful because it kind of forces you to kind of stick to this A4-sized page of of writing stuff. But it's more helpful if you want to share your notes. And sharing is really important. Sharing is caring, especially in medical school, we should all be collaborating and sharing our notes. If a friend of mine asks for my notes, all I have to do is export it as a PDF and I can send it to them. Whereas when I used to try and share OneNote drives, you'd have to share the link to the OneDrive thing and it would never work. And if you tried to export it to a PDF, you'd end up with this really weird-shaped PDF that no one would be able to read. I'll be honest, I've not really tried many of the other apps. The ones I've tried are OneNote, Notability, and Evernote. And of those three, I love Notability the most. But there are a few others like GoodNotes and and stuff like that. But there's lots of other YouTube videos where people compare GoodNotes with OneNote and a few of the other ones that if you really want to kind of shop for more, you can find them. But the one that works for me and that's worked for me for the last like four years is Notability and I've not really looked back. Now I want to talk you through some of the use cases that I find um and how I use Notability to take notes in those use cases. So, let's start with lectures. Uh, lectures are a staple of all university courses. How do we take notes in lectures? Ideally, we want to be pre-reading the lecture notes or the slides to get an idea of what the broad subheadings are, and then we can kind of write those subheadings down right at the top of our note. But more often than not, most students, including myself, we tend not to pre-read the lecture, even though we should. Uh, so most of our note-taking tends to be in the format of like while the lecture is happening, we're taking notes. So, a couple of weeks ago, we had a revision lecture for radiology that I am going to show you. And I think that illustrates some of these some of these principles nicely. Radiology revision for finals. Let's go all the way to the top. So, as the lecturer was saying important things, I was writing stuff down. This is what writing stuff looks like. And, you know, you can draw you can draw arrows, you can like color things in, you can use the highlighter to highlight things if that helps. So, I was doing all of that as the lecture was happening and that actually just generally helps me be more engaged with lectures. Otherwise, I tend to find that I fall asleep in lectures. It's very easy to fall asleep. But if I'm taking notes and I'm focused on A, understanding what the lecturer is talking about, and B, distilling it into decent note format that also looks pretty, that engages my brain enough to keep me awake. Another really good feature of Notability is that you can take pictures as you're going along and include them into your notes. So, radiology is quite an image-based subject. So, as the lecturer was putting up uh chest X-rays and stuff on the PowerPoint, I was kind of getting my iPad up, taking a photo of it, and then putting it um into into Notability and then highlighting them. So, as you can see, we've got quite a few chest X-rays here. We've got some annotations. We've got some some highlighting that I've done. And if I wanted to, I could like draw more boxes and you can you can basically do anything uh after you're done with an image. You can like move it around, you can crop it. And yeah, you just end up with like a good set of notes for the lecture that can look quite pretty as well. So, that's what happens in lectures that have PowerPoints. Um, we had a class yesterday, actually, uh where we had a handout instead, and it was like a small group session. There wasn't really a PowerPoint. It was just a handout and we were working through the handout. Now, I don't like handouts at all because I lose them and they get crumpled up in my bag and I don't like paper. I've gone completely paperless. So, what I did is I used my phone. I used the Scannable app, which you can get for free on a phone, to scan in the little bits of paper, the handout that we got. It was like a seven-page handout. I scanned it all in using Scannable, converted it to a PDF, AirDropped it across to my iPad, opened it in Notability, and this is what it looked like. We were talking about prescribing fluids. So, I started off by just making a standard a standard page in Notability and kind of writing some stuff down, some stuff about what's good fluid replacement is and how to deal with hyponatremia. That's reduced sodium. And then I added the the PDF that I scanned in. So, as you can see, this is the handout. There are some questions here, and I was able to annotate and kind of fill in the worksheet as we were going along in our session. And now I will have this on my iPad, on my Mac, on my phone, like forever. Thirdly, I find that the iPad is really good for making notes in real life, uh, especially in clinical scenarios. So, let's say I'm observing a GP consultation and and the patient has mentioned something. Uh, I would like make a new note and let's say they're talking about their like chest pain or something, and at some point they mentioned the phrase that they've got Ebstein's anomaly. So, I would write this down in my notes. And I would think, huh, I don't really know what Ebstein's anomaly is. So, there's a very easy day to get easy way to get around that. I can just open up Safari in split-screen mode. I can go and Google, I can type in Ebstein's anomaly. And then I get the results straight there. Ebstein's anomaly is a congenital heart defect in which the septal and posterior leaflets of the tricuspid valve are displaced towards the apex of the right ventricle of the heart. Uh, so if that means anything to me, I can just kind of select it on the iPad and the really cool thing is you can just like drag and drop. You can drag and drop text. Let's say I want this image, I can just grab it, drop it straight into Notability. What a time to be alive. This is absolutely incredible. And if I want, I can just kind of draw a box around it. I can like highlight stuff. I can like change the color and draw another picture. And I'm doing this all while the patient is there kind of in in this room. Obviously, you won't be paying attention to the patient, but in these circumstances when you do have to look stuff up that is quite critical for you to understand, having an iPad there is so much better than getting your phone out because getting your phone out means that everyone thinks you're like texting on your phone and it just looks really rude having a phone out. Whereas if you have your little iPad and your pencil out and you're like writing stuff down and, you know, actually actively paying attention and kind of looking things up, making your notes, that looks a lot more professional, looks a lot more legit rather than getting your phone out. So, that's another reason why I really like using tablets in in the workplace environment. So, what else is Notability good for? Um, it's really good for annotating PDFs of books and just kind of having there as a store of various PDFs. So, hypothetically, if I were to download PDFs of medical textbooks rather than buy the 50-pound versions of them, or perhaps in addition to buying the 50-pound versions of them, hypothetically, I'd be able to import those PDFs into Notability. And let's say it's a multiple choice questions book. It's got some questions on it. I can just kind of answer them on the iPad and I'm not kind of ruining it. I can always kind of rub them out if I have to, but it's just a very easy way of getting a lot of textbooks onto your onto your system, reading through them, highlighting, annotating, doing whatever you want. On the note of annotating PDFs, I've also recently started to learn how to read music on the piano. So, I downloaded loads of sheet music and I have it like in a sheet music folder organized by, you know, classical, pop, Disney, Yiruma, music from musicals. Let's get some, you know, Sound of Music, Climb Every Mountain, all of this stuff. Phantom of the Opera, All I Ask of You. So, you can see I I've managed to download this sheet music online um and put it in as a PDF. And actually, one of the songs that I'm learning is Jared Radnich's version of Pirates of the Caribbean. And because I'm not very good at reading music, I've been able to annotate stuff using Notability. So, I can like write down the names of the notes, write down the names of the chords, and that helps me kind of learn a bit better. And finally, I use it as a general note-taking app just just for life in general. So, if I ever have an idea for a YouTube video, I would just kind of make a new document about it. This is the one that I made about this very video. I had the idea on the 24th of February 2018, apparently. And I had this sort of idea of what I would make, what I would say in the video and kind of extended it over time. And the reason I like handwriting notes is that it like encourages me to make more notes. Normally, I just type stuff out, but typing stuff out is quite boring, whereas, you know, putting up a plan for a a YouTube video together by like, you know, writing stuff down and doing arrows and doing boxes and making it look pretty encourages me to actually do it. And I think that alone is worth having the iPad for. If it encourages you to improve your note-taking and to take more notes about, you know, just general ideas, general day-to-day life, that's a really useful thing. So, yeah, those were some of the ways that I use Notability. Um, I hope you found that useful. I think that brings us to the end of the video now. Uh, we've talked about why I use the iPad at all for note-taking rather than handwriting or rather than typing notes up, which are the other two alternatives. We've talked about which iPad I'd recommend, probably the budget 2018 one that does have Apple Pencil support. Um, but I've got a more detailed video comparing the iPad Pro and the 2018 iPad coming up at some point soon, hopefully. We talked about which app I use, Notability all the way, unless you have a Windows computer, in which case you probably want to use OneNote. It has broadly similar features. And we talked about a couple of use cases like, you know, lectures, handouts, in clinical scenarios, uh, sheet music, general ideas, annotating PDFs of books, all of that stuff. So, I really hope you found this this video useful. A lot of you have been asking how I use the iPad for note-taking, uh, because I've, you know, used it all the time in my study with me videos. So, I hope this has given you some insight into that. If you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, please consider doing so. Have a lovely day, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.