Software Review: VoodooPad

We’ve discussed some different ways of taking notes before, here and here. When you’re taking notes in a digital form, using the right software to keep them together is very important. One application that is particularly suitable for this is VoodooPad by Flying Meat. Here’s a review.

You can use VoodooPad for taking notes, brainstorming and jotting down your ideas, but how does it work? For people familiar with wikis on the internet (click for a definition on Wikipedia), VoodooPad will have a very familiar interface: you write down some text and create links which automatically point to new, blank pages. So actually you’re creating a web consisting of different pages, linked to each other. Read more

A New Year of Learning: How to Take Notes?

You might think it’s ridiculous to spend your holiday thinking about how you’re going to take notes the coming year. When the year is over though, you will be glad you did, when you have all the notes you took together so it will be easy to find the information on that specific topic you wrote about in january.

During the year a great amount of information will be fired at you, and it will be way too much for you to remember. It will probably also be way too much for you to write down, so it’s important to capture the essentials.

Don’t let those precious words escape

As a student I had a ring binder with tabs for each class. I used this binder for a year and the next year I bought a new one, fresh paper and tabs to start over. Looking back at the things I wrote down at that time it’s amazing to see how much information got lost. Some lessons are almost gone, just a few words remain but I don’t remember a thing of what’s been said. Read more

Taking Notes: Choosing the Right Tools

It’s a known fact: the longer the lecture or presentation, the smaller the amount of information that will be remembered. If a lecture is 30 minutes long, students don’t remember the first 15 minutes as well as in a lecture with a duration of only those first 15 minutes. So how can we keep track of the information given to us in a two-hour lecture?

Not Just Reading a Book

When we read a fiction book we probably read a line only once. That’s no problem. We don’t really have to remember that specific line, but we want to understand the story. When we have to learn something, say for our final exams, we really have to study the material and make sure we will not forget what we read. So we have to read it over and over again, or use a smart highlighting system to keep track of the most important fact and information.

However, when we listen to a lecturer or a presenter, we can’t highlight words or read things over several times until we really understand what’s being said Read more