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

Hey guys welcome back to the channel if you knew here my name is Elias I'm a final year, medical student at Cambridge, University, and today we're going to be talking about how I take notes are using the iPad and the Apple Pencil in terms of structure. These videos 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, and the second part will talk about exactly which iPad I use, which one I'd recommend, and then I'll talk a bit about the app note ability that I use and why I use it and the final bit of video will 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 are bits of the video that you like to skip, you can just skip to the appropriate section in the timestamps, but now, let's 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 knife, 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 in the Apple Pencil is because I think both these methods have the disadvantages and the iPad on 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 hand, write 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, so it 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 dreams and reams of paper, and I've got a lot of friends who hand write their notes, and they admit that, actually they don't really look at the 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. Furthermore, you know, top solves this problem of accessibility. Everything's. All in one place, everything is synced across all your different devices.

The problem we're 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'd end 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 ideas precedes the ohms and ours, but not really have taken anything in, and I have to read through it. Like a ten-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 and a word-for-word I found that the notes that I would take while typing would just be kind of a little of prose.

A few bullet points a bit prose for 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, if just a bit bland and that's why I didn't write like typing up stuff now, the reason I use the iPad and the Apple Pencil is because I think it combines these two. 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. This is an iPad Pro.

The new budget, 2018 iPad, does have Apple Pencil support, and it does solve some problems to go. That'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. As I said this is the iPad Pro 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 20-18 iPad as well, which has Apple Pencil support and is about half the price of the iPad Pro egg. 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 screen or like the screen and the thing so that it feels a little more like you're writing on paper. Whereas would that 2018 iPad? You have a little of a gap, most videos that I've seen on YouTube say that you don't really notice this gap with the 2018 iPad unless you'll like a digital artist. So if you're just buying an iPad to take notes 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 the comments, and I'll expedite the process of that happening. So by this point we've got an iPad. Now, what app do I use? 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 macOS device that you, your laptop or 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 to structure your notes, and so you get dividers, and you get width and dividers. You get subjects so, depending on the layout of your course, depending on how you want to organize things, that's quite an intuitive way of doing it, because it's how we naturally 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're gonna.

You can write in a 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 dog, 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, the app I can convert that to a PDF and airdrop it to my iPad, open straight up and 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 is really helpful. It's helpful because it kind of forces you to kind of stick to this a4 size, page 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 on it. 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 and 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. There are a few others like good notes and stuff like that, but there are loads of other YouTube videos where people compare good notes 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 this 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 and how I use notability to take notes in those use cases. So, let's start with lectures.

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 so most of our note-taking tends to be in the format of light. 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 it. You can draw arrows. You can like color things in. Furthermore, you can use the highlighter to highlight things if that helps, but 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 an understanding what the lecturer is talking about and be distilling it into decent note format, that also looks pretty that engages my brain enough to keep me away. Another perfect 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 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 into notability and then like highlighting them. So, as you can see, we've got quite a few chests. X-Rays here, we've got some annotations.

We've got some highlighting that I've done and if I wanted to I could like to draw more box there's, and you can basically do anything after you're done with an image you can like to 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. We had a class yesterday, actually where we had a handout instead, and it was like a small group session that wasn't really a PowerPoint or just a handout.

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 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 air dropped it across to my iPad, opened it up in notability, and this is what it looks like: we're talking about prescribing fluids, so I started off, but it's making a standard, a standard, page and notability and kind of writing some stuff down some stuff about, what's good fluid replacement ears and how to deal with hyponatremia, that's a reduced sodium, and then I added the PDF that I'd 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 found that the iPad is perfect for making notes in real life, especially in clinical scenarios. So let's say I'm observing a GP consultation and the patient has mentioned something. I would like to 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 Epstein's anomaly. So I would write this down in my notes and I would think. Huh, I, don't really know what Epstein'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 in Google, I can type in Epstein's and normally and then I get the results straight there.

Epstein's anomaly is a congenital heart defect in which the septal and posterior leaflet of the tricuspid valve are displaced towards the apex of the right. Ventricle of the heart, 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 a 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 to change the color and draw on a picture, and I'm doing this all. While the patient is there kind of 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 up, because getting your phone up means that everyone thinks you're like texting on your phone.

It just looks really rude having a phone up, whereas if you have your little iPad in your pencil out, and you're like writing stuff down- and you know actually actively paying attention and start making units that looks a lot more professional looks a lot more legit rather than getting your phone up. So that's another reason why I really like using tablets in the workplace environment. So what else is notability good for um? It's perfect for annotating PDFs of books and just kind of having there is a store of various PDFs. So hypothetically, if I were to download PDFs of medical textbooks rather than by the 50-pound versions of them. Well, but perhaps, in addition to buying the 50 pounds version, then 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 in 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 on to your onto your system, reading through them or highlighting annotating doing whatever you want on the note of annotating PDFs I have 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, humor, music, music from musicals and to get some of you know sound of music climb every mountain all this stuff and with your Alaskan you, so you can see I've managed to download the sea sheet music online and put it in as PDF, and actually one of the songs that I'm learning is Jared. Ranch versions 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 to write down the names of the notes, write on 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 up 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 out a plan for 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 of 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, though yeah those were some of the ways that I use, notability I, hope you found that useful I think that brings us to the end of the video. Now we've talked about why I use the iPad at all for note-taking, rather than how writing, or rather than typing notes up, which are the other tools, and we've talked about which I've heard recommend.

Probably the budget 2018, one that does have Apple Pencil support, but I've got a more detailed video, comparing the iPad Pro and the 2018 iPad coming up at some point soon. Hopefully, who 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 sheet, music, general ideas, annotating PDFs of books, all of that stuff. So I really hope you found this either this video useful. A lot of you have been asking how I use the iPad for note-taking, because I know, use 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.

Source : Ali Abdaal