How to UPGRADE iPad note taking (with Science)

I am a tree's best friend because for the last 12 years I've been taking notes almost exclusively on my tablet there's nothing special about that there's lots of people that take notes on their tablet but the way that I write notes has allowed me to achieve the top ranking Mark in my cohort while spending a fraction of the time studying compared to everyone else in this video I'm going to go through how to use an iPad to write notes in the most cognitively effective way possible based on real evidence-based learning science and the way that

a lot of people write notes using an iPad that actually cripples the iPad's ability to help you if you are new to this channel welcome I'm Dr Justin Sun I'm a learning coach and the head of learning at ien study for the last decade I've helped thousands of Learners from around the world learn more efficiently during that time I have spoken and lectured at universities and for corporates all around the world and note taking is consistently something that is almost never properly taught and learning to do it right can make a huge difference before we

jump into it I'd appreciate if you give this video a like every like helps to push this video out to more people so that I can keep making more content for free for starters let's look at some really absolutely atrocious note taking without using an iPad and I'll explain exactly what's wrong with it by recognizing what's bad then you can see how an iPad could potentially help you as well as how you could also just make the exact same mistakes on an iPad so here's an example of some notes that I think I just absolute

garbage the person writing these notes obviously had no idea what they were doing they probably spent all their time studying and had no life I mean very very wordy look at that this person was I can guarantee an absolute loser how do I know this because these are my notes from 10 years ago and I can tell you that that is completely true this is back in the time when I was trying to enter into medical school and I was just like a clueless amoeba about learning I knew absolutely nothing uh and I miraculously ended

up getting into medical school so what is actually wrong with these types of notes so first of all as you can see it is very linear I've talked about this a lot of my other videos but linear note taking just does not work it takes a lot of time you write a lot and it's just not very good for memory and understanding I've got some pictures and I've got some drawings here and there but overall it's very isolated everything is just you know again fairly linear and the reason is that true knowledge is not linear

true expertise is not linear for example back when I was a doctor not that I was really actually an expert but I would be able to use my knowledge in lots of different ways for example if someone came in with a headache I knew how to think about that I knew what questions to ask what information I needed what pieces were missing and I knew the importance of that new piece of information if they said they had a headache but they also had you know dizziness I knew how to relate those things together and form

a conclusion however when an expert has to teach something that knowledge has to become linear because there is no other way to teach that knowledge you can't read multiple sentences at the same time you can't hear multiple lines being spoken at the same time the human brain needs to have sensory information one at a time so linearity is a necessary evil of all teaching and learning even if I showed you a map of a topic that looks very nonlinear if you looked at it you wouldn't actually know where to start you still need to have

someone point out you know where things go you know it would be too hard to follow but the important thing is that even though teaching and learning has to be linear you as a learner have to reconstruct that knowledge into the nonlinear network of expertise rather than just trying to commit the imperfect linear version and with linear note taking it is very very hard to represent a network and relationships as a quick example here is a nonlinear set of notes for some of the basic principles of learning science and then here is the exact same

amount of data and relationships actually not even all of the relationships expressed through just words you can see that one is a clean and organized nice structure and then the other one is like trying to decipher the matrix by looking at that green wall of code on the monitor you can see how much more memorable the nonlinear version is especially for me since I'm the one that had to think about how to actually represent it so it makes more sense for me the Creator than for you who is just seeing the final product and that

example is just working with a few Concepts and not even going that in depth as another example this is a set of notes that I did for part of my masters of education it's literally hundreds of pages worth of textbook and journal articles and it was enough for me to get 100% in my paper in fact I was the first person to ever get 100% in that paper and it might seem unbelievable but there is actually a lot of very intricate Nuance packed into the arrangement of those notes so as soon as I start to

think nonlinearly a lot of things change about how I process the information instead of focusing on just getting the information down I'm now focusing on what does it mean how does it connect how does it relate to what I've already got where do I place it how important is it this is called higher order learning and it directly translates into better retention and deeper understanding just as another example here is this exact page or two pages of notes from 10 years ago that I'm redoing nonlinearly so that you can see the difference the main processes

I'm using during this are to constantly look for relationships const constantly create groups based on those relationships and then constantly try to create relationships between the groups and at all times I'm thinking about how each thing relates to the big picture and how I could express all of this as simply as possible interestingly while I was doing this I found that actually my linear notes were so superficial that I had to end up just Googling things because it wasn't really allowing me to figure things out and that just goes to show how shallow my learning

was even though I thought I was being incredibly detailed really I was just writing a lot of words to try to represent how it all fits together while also at the same time wasting a lot of time just writing things down without even properly fitting it all together in the end so it's kind of a lose lose situation I had to Google a lot of things to figure out how it all fits together you can see as I do this things are generally getting missier and missier and there's more relationships form me you can see

I'm constant zooming in and out between different things see how it all fits together and then after that I clean it up to make it simpler the good thing about doing it this way is that we can see all the different relationships that need to be expressed and then I can go through and clean it up instead of trying to figure out everything mentally which is going to be overloading and this is the right way to use note taking it helps our brain think about the connections it helps it simplify the information down it does

take some more thinking and practice but it is well worth the investment because trust me after doing this the level of confidence I felt with this page of information is way higher than when I first made this honestly I'm kind of amazed that I even managed to get an A+ with the level of detail that I had on these linear notes like it was so superficial I also felt a lot more curious about it and I can tell that the information is just stuck a lot more strongly In My Memory whereas before it used to

feel like the information is slipping away almost as soon as I'd finished writing the notes but that is not all another thing that you can see is that I've massively cut down on how wordy it is research actually says that notes that have higher word counts are associated with worse performance and grades this is not because words are evil it's because having more words usually means you were thinking and processing the information less which means less learning and a lot of people say that I'll write my notes first and then I'll do all of this

thinking and connecting and everything later but if all of the meaningful learning is being done later then you're probably going to run out of time and it's also just unnecessary extra work for yourself in addition one of the other really awesome things about nonlinear note taking is that you can express a lot with just the arrangement and the arrows and the spacing on a page like you know those times where you're trying to explain something to someone and you're explaining it and then you're just like ah forget it let me just show you instead it's

kind of like the same thing with note taking it's usually better to show rather than explain with like an extra couple hundred words for example if you look at the screen you can see that in the beginning I had this like big loopy Arrow going like this this one here that big loopy arrow and initially I was thinking well where am I meant to put that how do I express it and so I had to make a decision to turn that Arrow into this one right here you can see that it's a lot cleaner now

I had to think about where to place that and that's the same for each of these arrows I had to think where do I want to put all of these elements and where do I want to put all of these arrows to be able to express that relationship in a way that I think makes sense and is quite clean like for example I broke up this part into two this actually used to originally be up here like this a single flow but I thought that it would make more sense to split it up into two

and I actually still agree with that and obviously in the linear notes it looked nothing like this it just looked like this which really doesn't Express anything and you can see that this involves a lot more thinking and processing of the information than even par paraphrasing or summarizing but that is not all of the problems because uh there's one more final issue which is that when you write linear notes on physical paper you're limited by the size of the actual paper so this is a good example where all the stuff on this page and on

this page are related they're in the same topic there are really important relationships between this and with the stuff on the other Pages too but trying to express all that on paper is very limiting even when people are doing nonlinear notes on paper a lot of the time I'll see students writing these nonlinear notes but because you're using paper the scope and type of connections that they're forming are just limited by how much they could fit on that page so their learning is really dictated by how much they can fit on an A4 piece of

paper rather than a authentic genuine representation of the ideas if this happens then we are essentially artificially cutting off and killing important connections relationships that could help us develop a deeper understanding that's why an iPad is so useful because you can have a app on there with Infinite Canvas and your page never ends there are no edges ever FYI I use an app called Concepts and a lot of the students on our program use Concepts as well however Apple has also recently released free form which comes bundled with every iPad and that works pretty much

just as well okay let's keep the roast fest going let's have a look at some of the other notes that I have written and explain also why they are garbage so these are some of the notes in my course guide and you can see I'm doing a lot of like annotating a lot of highlighting yeah I mean like I've got like a whole other set of notes just like written on my course guide and you know I used to do this on lecture slides as well this is also pretty bad again because I'm not really

doing any thinking I'm not really processing the information at all I'm just dumping it on the page if I'm in a lecture that is just going way too fast and I'm going overwhelmed and I know I'm just not able to keep up and process as I go then it's sometimes fine I know that when I wrote These this was not even during a lecture like this was in my self study there was no time pressure really like I didn't have to do this but you know the ones that I did on my lecture slides usually

I was struggling to keep up during the lecture so I was just documenting it down and that can be acceptable but if afterwards the way you're consolidating that is to just turn all of those into linear notes again then we're just running into the exact same problems that I already explained ideally to avoid that situation we should have done some pre-study first and created a skeleton overall big picture frame of the topic so that when we're in the lecture we can actually fill that in with more detail and then afterwards in our self study we

can add more detail and clean that up a little bit more add more detail clean it up add more clean it up so on and so forth this is why pre-study and priming is one of the most important parts of learning system because it can massively reduce the amount of overwhelm that you feel and if you want to learn more about that then check out the video here so I think based on that we can see why using an iPad can be so effective however there are some ways that people will use an iPad that

makes it basically the same as just using paper and it frustrates me a lot to see this because this stuff is not cheap if you bought an iPad you should use it to its full capacity and make Steve Jobs proud or something so let me go through the examples of how people use an iPad in still the wrong ways but before we jump in I'd like to thank our sponsor me if you didn't already know everything that I've talked about in this video and actually everything I talk about in basically every other video that I've

ever made is already in our guided stepbystep program at iin study.com I'm not gatekeeping the secrets to efficiency here I'm still going to be producing content for free but this program is simply just the fastest and easiest and most guided way for you to improve your skills because I don't have to make videos playing the YouTube algorithm game I can just put my educator hat on and teach you the skills the priority is to help you learn not to get views which is just the unfortunate reality of YouTube it also allows you to do the

very critical thing of asking questions and then getting feedback on your work I have poured countless hours into putting everything that I know that I've learned over the last decade of becoming a hyper efficient learner myself and more importantly training other people to replicate that kind of success if you are really serious about improving your learning and you want the fastest most efficient way to do that then I'd strongly recommend checking out our program at icen study.com you'll see a link in the description we've also got tons of reviews feel free to read them if

you like but anyway back to the video so a major problem of a lot of the learning apps that are available is that they are made by software developers not learning experts what they're doing is they're basically replicating the same note taking patterns and behaviors and Norms that people use with paper and then just converting that to the iPad and I have had a lot of discussions with some of these huge mega app developers and they are not willing to change their app to support learning science because it's just not a good business move it

takes a lot to try to educate someone to change their norms and habits on note taking just to get them to use your app and that's just not going to be a good sales strategy so I completely understand why they are that reluctant but as a learner that just means that you have to understand that using an app that is marketed for Learning and using it as designed does not necessarily mean that you are actually going to be learning efficiently so anyway here are some examples of some iPad note taking that I think can be

improved so see if you can spot what the issue is you can pause the video if you like try to figure it out yourself first one is this style of note taking we've got a picture copied in we've got some notes on the side sometimes you've got lots of annotating it looks beautiful but I do have serious doubts about how efficient it is what is the problem here pause if you want to think about it here's some other examples of basically the same thing yep the problem is exactly the same as everything I just explained

before about annotating and and linear note taking there isn't a whole lot of deep processing it's really just simple paraphrasing and summarizing there's no nit works it's very isolated the copying in images looks nice the pictures but again copy paste is literally the lowest form of processing that you can do yes it's easier than trying to draw it or represent the most important parts of it for yourself but it doesn't actually make it very memorable so yes it's easy but it's also not that useful okay here has a better one uh but what is the

problem here yes it's the limited page size so as a result the notes are still actually pretty linear there are some networks on this but the networks are really small and really isolated so again it's not like how real expertise should be built and structured all right final one what is the problem here this is a bit trickier it isn't very linear and the person isn't limited by Page size but the person hasn't process the information a lot because you can see that it's all sort of just coming off from the central branch which means

that the only thing that they decided on was that everything is related to this one group and everything just branches out from that they haven't really thought about how to simplify it they haven't thought about how it could be subgroup they haven't thought about any other ways of grouping it you know they haven't thought about how each of the branches relate to each other for those of you that are on our program at I can study you'll notice that this is the famous wheel and spokes problem so once you can start writing notes nonlinearly and

doing the right kind of thinking it just completely transforms your note taking experience one of the other major advantages is that it shows you visually where your knowledge gaps and weaknesses are what I mean is that because each step of writing the notes actually requires you to think about it and process it and make a conscious decision about how you want to express it if you struggle with that then you know that that is an area of weakness and there's a knowledge Gap normally to find these gaps with normal note taking you might have to

write your notes and spend hours and hours and then weeks later when you do a practice test and you test yourself and thinking with that same pathway you realize you struggle to answer the question or you get it wrong and that's how you discover the Gap by doing this we can save literally weeks worth of time and identify the gaps immediately as you are putting them down and as a side effect we're also becoming more curious because we're finding the Gap and then we're filling the Gap and that's actually a very enjoyable engaging experience as

each Gap fills our knowledge is actually becoming fundamentally stronger and more connected and so our expertise is growing and then as we learn more it gets easier and easier and simpler to understand so even though it technically takes longer to write your notes down like literally because you actually have to think about it as you write you're saving time massively overall because a you're actually having to write left l b you're actually forgetting less C you're understanding it more deeply in the first place so you don't have to do as many repetitions to try to

get to that depth which is better for your confidence and anxiety D we're actually finding knowledge gaps potentially weeks earlier and E because it's helping us develop these knowledge networks it means that future content is faster and easier to learn because we have existing networks to build off and so by now you might be thinking damn learning is not as simple as I thought it was and the answer is well yeah you're right it takes time it is a legit skill but it is time that is worth investing in it pays you off lifelong what

I always say is that time is going to pass anyway and months from now you're either going to have the skill or you won't and if you want to make the process of learning the skill easier then I'd recommend checking out our sponsor if you want to keep going down the rabbit hole of what efficient learning looks like then make sure to check out the playlist at the end of this video If you like this video then please subscribe to make sure you don't miss future uploads thank you for watching and I'll see you next

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