Thread: Taking Notes - Laptop question

For those of you currently attending SGU, what is the most typical way of taking notes during class? Do most/all professors hand out powerpoint slide notes prio to class, or are all lecture notes posted online for students to access at will?

If notes are not presented before class online as either paper documents or online, do many students type their own notes on their laptops during class?

For those courses requiring diagrams to be draw, would you find it helpful/necessary to have a tablet notebook computer where you can draw on the screen?

One more quick question for the computer heads out there - would you feel that having a laptop with 80GB hardrive space and 512MB RAM is suitable for the volume of material that will be loaded on the computer, or is it a bit better to go with 100GB hardrive and 1GB RAM?

Thanks for your time.

Most classes hand out paper notes prior, as well as post lecture power points (and even audio recordings in St. Vincent) online.

A lot of students bring laptops to class, but not many take notes on them - they are usually just used in to surf the internet during the less useful lectures.

The regular vs. tablet pc has been discussed - do a search, but I think the consensus was that if the tablet pc works for you, great, but they are no way required or super advantageous.

80gigs would be more than enough for the academic files. If you anticipate having a large video/audio collection, you may want more.

I say pre read before the lecture on sunday and then once the day of then just sit and listen and take notes on the finer points you don't understand. I know so many people who would just take their laptop and IM or surf the net during class it was a waste for them to even just show up.

I bought a Toshiba convertible tablet, principally for medical school, but used it exclusive the last semester and a half finishing up pre-reqs. While it is not a panacea, as stated above, I cannot begin to tell you how happy I have been with its performance. There are oddities to using a tablet, and they take a little getting used to. Beyond that, in tablet mode, I take notes in real-time, can switch to different colors and pen sizes in real-time, and the lectures in Powerpoint record audio that is timed to each slide, so it makes reviewing lectures VERY efficient, indeed. You basically will loose the tablet functionality if you are given PDF's, though. To solve this, I have written a Powerpoint macro that will convert PDF to Powerpoint up to 50 slides at a time. It works great, and I am happy to share the code, if anyone out there is interested. PM me.
Cheers,
TheTallGuy

Originally Posted by islander23

For those of you currently attending SGU, what is the most typical way of taking notes during class? Do most/all professors hand out powerpoint slide notes prio to class, or are all lecture notes posted online for students to access at will?

If notes are not presented before class online as either paper documents or online, do many students type their own notes on their laptops during class?

For those courses requiring diagrams to be draw, would you find it helpful/necessary to have a tablet notebook computer where you can draw on the screen?

One more quick question for the computer heads out there - would you feel that having a laptop with 80GB hardrive space and 512MB RAM is suitable for the volume of material that will be loaded on the computer, or is it a bit better to go with 100GB hardrive and 1GB RAM?

Thanks for your time.

You can pretty much do well just with just class handouts, though there is a trend of moving towards lousier incomplete handouts to make us go to class.

You only really need a computer for 4th term (path) though they are convenient to have for netsurfing and for holding your macdaddy files. I reccomend getting an external harddrive (at least 150 GB, you'll want to have 200GB total) for the board review materials as well, larger if you intend to download extracuricular stuff (movies, tunes, porn/erotica, games etc...)

-T-