My First Semester with the iPad Pro 11 inch: Student's Review By Paul Bradford

Hey guys this is Paul and I just finished up my first semester of my freshman year of college and ever since the iPad pro came out in early November I've been using it as my primary device for school and I love it! In the pas,t I've tried using almost every device out there for school but I never used something that's been able to fundamentally change the way I learned in such a big way which the iPad Pro has been able to do. So as a college student, I'm taking notes all the time and my favorite method of notetaking is by hand because if I type my notes on the computer I just kind of zone out and copy down what's in front of me without actually paying attention to what's happening in the class. I also like having the ability to sort of write out what I visualize in my head in a logical way that I'm gonna understand later and you just can't do that when you're typing your notes. If I'm pressed for time, I might decide to type out my notes, but most of the time, I prefer doing them by hand. So for the first few months of college, I was taking my notes just the old-school way, just in spiral-bound notebooks, but when the iPad pro came out in November, I decided to give it a shot and I don't think I'm gonna switch back anytime soon. I decided to purchase Notability to take all my notes in, I think it was around $8, and I heard that GoodNotes is another popular choice and there's probably a few free apps out there that are decent for note-taking but I decided to go with Notability because I've heard nothing but great things about it and I figured I couldn't go wrong with it.

And the first time I actually sat down in class, pulled up Notability, and used my iPad to take notes with, I saw immediate benefits. So we can actually go back and look at that first page of notes I took and you'll see that initially, I used the iPad just like I would use a normal pen and paper, just writing down what I thought was necessary. But as the class went on I started messing around with a few of the features within the app and that's when I really started to fall in love with taking notes on the iPad. I started using different colors to help me distinguish what I was doing and I kind of created my own sort of color scheme that I ended up sticking with for the rest of the semester. So I use the color black for regular, just sort of informational notes.

I use red for key information, green for example problems given in class, blue for my answers to those problems, orange for the teacher's solution to the problems, and pink for any questions that I might want to ask later. I noticed that taking notes in this manner kept me so much more engaged in class because I was always thinking of what we were doing and what color I needed to be using. But more importantly, it made my notes so much easier to read when I went back to review them later because everything was color coded and I knew what I was looking at immediately. So I know some of you might be thinking that you could just do the same thing on paper with different colored pens, and I guess that would work, you'd still have to fumble around with all the different pens in class and carry them around all day, but you also wouldn't get any of the additional benefits which I'm about to talk about. The new Apple Pencil, the Apple Pencil 2, has this really cool feature where if you double tap the side of the pencil, it switches the writing tool that you're using.

So if I was writing something and I messed something up I could just double tap to switch to the eraser tool, erase what I just wrote, and double tap again to switch back to the pen. Back when I took notes on paper, I would end up with scribbled out notes all over the page so it's nice that I don't have to deal with that on the iPad. The Apple Pencil itself is really nice. I love the matte finish that they went with this year and it has a really nice weight to it so it feels nice in the hand. Now some people don't actually like the physical sensation of writing on a screen but I don't mind it at all, I think it feels fine, so I would say if you're concerned about that, I would recommend going to the Apple store and trying it out there.

Another benefit of digital note-taking is the ability to quickly move around and resize anything that you've written. So for example, if you wanted to go back and add something into something you've already written down, you can just use the cut tool and outline some of the text and pull it down to make room for something else that you want to write. And keep in mind that while I'm talking about my experience with the Notability app, these are pretty basic features that I think would be available to most note-taking apps out there. But my favorite and I think the most useful feature that I use on a daily basis is something called Note Replay. So if you tap the little microphone in the top right corner of Notability, it starts recording using the built-in mic on the iPad.

So I thought that was pretty cool, I could go back and listen to what happened in class that day. But when I went back to play it later that day, I saw that it synchronized my writing with what the teacher was saying in class so I could see exactly what I was writing while the teacher was talking. Basically, this allows me to review the entire class if I wanted to do so, which is an incredibly valuable learning tool for me. And there are even more advantages that come with taking notes on the iPad. You can back your notes up to the cloud so you'll always have access to them on all of your devices, I have mine backed up to Google Drive, you can also seamlessly just take a picture and insert it directly into your notes, you can share your notes with classmates just by email, and so much more that make this, in my opinion, the best way to take notes out there.

And everything I just talked about can technically be done on the nine point seven inch, just base model iPad, so you don't really need the eight hundred dollar iPad Pro to do this, but there are a few advantages that come with this heftier price tag. First off, I think the 11 inch size is perfect. I was really torn between the 11 inch and the 13 inch when this was first announced but I'm really glad I went with the 11 inch because it's definitely big enough to take notes on, handwritten notes, I had no problem with that whatsoever, but it's also small enough to use like a normal tablet. It's comfortable enough to hold in one hand, but also big enough for split-screen use, which I used all the time with my schoolwork. And if you want to watch movies or videos on this thing, consume any sort of media, it's definitely big enough for that as well.

I'm also a huge fan of the 120 Hertz so-called "Pro Motion" display, which basically means that this display refreshes at twice the rate of most other screens out there. And this is really important for note-taking in particular because it makes handwriting your notes just that much more natural because there's practically no delay between your input and what shows up on the screen. So that's my experience using the iPad pro for college. Now there's so much more to this device, I know it's an incredibly powerful tablet, Jonathan from TLD today made a great video showing how this is even able to edit 4k footage, which is ridiculous, but I also think it's a great learning tool for any students out there. It keeps me more engaged in my classes, it makes my notes much more comprehensible, and I'm able to go back and practically replay every single class, and for me, that makes it worth the hefty price tag.

If you are interested in the iPad Pro, I think it's about $40 off on Amazon at the time of this recording, so I'll leave a link for that in the description below. I also get a ton of questions about what gear I use to make my videos, so I've started linking all my gear in the descriptions of all my videos, and those are Amazon affiliate links, so if you purchase something through one of those links, I get a small percentage back and it really helps the channel out. Anyways, if you liked this video, leaving a thumbs up would be greatly appreciated, and I'll catch you guys in my next video. Deuces, baby.

Source : Paul Bradford