Taking Notes The Google Way

In grade school they always would say, “Take note so you can study them later.” It was even worse when teachers would check your notes and grade them, because then I couldn’t sit there and just pretend I was taking them. I always hated this. I’ve never been much for taking notes. I learn by listening, not by writing and I can’t count the number of times I’ve missed something the teacher said because I was writing something else down. Whenever I do write something down I usually never look at it anyways and when I do look something up, half the time I took the wrong notes. So, when it comes to note taking, I figure my wrists take enough abuse when I’m on the computer and that they deserve a break during class.

Recently, however, I’ve been in classes that are very complex and there’s really no way that I can remember everything just from listening. Most teachers will post their power point slides and I just study from that. This semester however, my Psychology teacher isn’t posting her slides and said that we’d need to take our own notes. So, I tried something interesting last week, I actually took notes in Psychology 101. I know it shocks me too.

“What’s special about that?” you ask. Well, I did it on my computer in Google Docs. I’ve always hated paper notes because of all the writing and I’ve always hated using Microsoft Word because it ties you to one computer. Google Docs fixes both those problems.

With Google Docs I was able to type my notes, which I don’t mind doing cause I can type much faster than I can write. What happened tonight though is what really caught my interest. I had to take a quiz by midnight and thought I should study a bit first. My notes were taken on my laptop and I was currently working on my desktop. That wasn’t a problem. I just went to Google Docs and opened my notes. No computer booting, file transferring, or downloading was needed, just a bookmark and a few clicks and I was there. I also noticed after studying and taking the quiz that I take much better note when I type; probably because I can type so much faster that I’m not afraid to add more information. I was also able to reorganize my notes quickly and easily while taking them on the computer if the teacher added more info to a previous topic.

The notes really helped, I guess this semester in Psychology I’ll actually be taking notes and using them.