Regardless of the class, course or grade level, taking notes in written form is the strategy most commonly used by students for learning information in school. Post note-taking, reviewing what was taught often involves highlighting key points or rewriting notes to organize and help retain the information. These strategies work for some students, but for many they are not an effective note taking and review process.
Traditional, Written Notes Don’t Work For All Students
For many students, written note taking is difficult and simply re-reading the information afterwards is not enough to help them retain or assimilate what they were supposed to have learned. For these students, I would like to suggest an alternative strategy.
Try Taking Visual Notes, Mapping Out What You Have Heard or Read
Taking notes by mapping the information is an effective way to capture ideas quickly and start to assimilate the information. By mapping information and key points, you are unencumbered by the clutter of full sentences and blocks of text. Adding images and color draws your attention to key points and utilizes visual memory to stimulate recall.
With traditional, non-visual notes, relating and connecting concepts is difficult — you have to add concepts presented later in the lecture to the end of your notes, and there is no way to show their connection to earlier presented material. But with visual notes, you can add related, newly presented concepts next to the original concept, right into your map. This helps you form a picture in your mind of how the information is connected. This is ideal for organizing and starting to assimilate the information.
If you are lucky enough to take notes on a computer using Inspiration or Webspiration Classroom, the process described below will flow easily and later, when reviewing your notes, organizing and studying from them will take less time.
How To Take Visual Notes
1) Start with the main idea: Begin with recording the central idea or key topic in the center of your paper or screen. If using an Inspiration Software product, type your central idea in the main idea symbol.
These visual notes were taken using Inspiration Maps for iPad
2) Add key words or phrases in subtopic symbols: As the lecture or your reading progresses, listen and look for key pieces of information, such as: events, dates, key terms, and explanations. Start to build out your notes by adding this information into subtopic idea symbols coming out of your main idea. Tip! Don’t try to capture what you hear or read about in complete sentences, and whenever you can, paraphrase the material in your own words.
3) Record random points by themselves: Often while you are learning something new, you will hear what sounds at the time to be random bits of information. Don’t worry about how this information is related. Capture random points anywhere on your map. The beauty of visual notes is that they allow you to link, connect and associate points that seemed random at first to other topics and ideas when later, how they are related becomes clear. Tip! Be sure and capture words and terms you aren’t familiar with off to the side of your diagram to look those up or capture definitions later in the lecture or text.
4) As you capture ideas in subtopic symbols, draw or add images (optional): Often images can convey a concept better than words.
5) Connect and link your main points: Use linked arrows to make connections and show flow that you didn’t see at first during your initial note taking. And record any additional information or thoughts that come to mind.
Now you should have a visual map of all the main topics you learned, some supporting details, and some ideas on how the information fits together.
Review Your Visual Notes
Ideally, review your notes soon after the lecture while they are still fresh in your mind. Start by taking a step back and reviewing your visual notes as one image to start to see how all pieces of your information are related and interconnected. If you have taken your visual notes in Inspiration or Webspiration Classroom, move symbols around to group them logically; add links to show the relationships between concepts and hierarchy; and add color, images, and stylized text to help you retain the information.
Using Visual Notes to Study for a Test or Write a Paper
When you need to study and recall the information, start by visualizing your map and the threads and sub-paths that relate the information. You can even self-test by using Inspiration and Webspiration Classroom’s hide and show subtopics and notes functions.
Visual note taking can be a powerful tool to help improve your ability to learn, retain, and assimilate information, increasing your knowledge and understanding. Give it a try and see how it works for you. And if you are an iPad user, try Inspiration Maps to take visual notes and study, using your iPad. Inspiration Maps, from Inspiration Software will be available through the apps store in early April.
What type of note taking strategies do you encourage your students to try? What do you use for your own notes?
An interesting post, thank you! I agree with this fully; from my time as a student I’d write down a ridiculous amount when it all could have been summarised very easily into a concise drawing. Most students will have an iPad these days, but even a pencil and some paper will suffice!
Hi,this is Winter Liu.I think this aricle is very helpful to me, bacause I have never known how to take notes effectively before.When I was listening to a lecture during a English class in high school,I always tried my best to remember every mian point without taking notes; neverthless, I just could capture two or three points of them.I had tried to take notes,but they were too random for me to understand.After reading this article, I realize that taking visual notes is significant in my learning process.The key point is to map out what I heard.I will practise taking visual notes in my future studing.