Take Notes Like You Need Them

1. Welcome & Intro to this Class: Hi and welcome to take notes like you need them. I am Nina Araujo and I will be teaching this class. In this class, I will be sharing some recommendations as to how to be taking notes, creating notes and sharing notes. As an instructional designer and teacher, I have learned quite a few strategies along the way that I'm very excited to be sharing with you. This is an open class, so make it yours, take whatever you need or whatever you want and transform it, make it different. We will use a very collaborative forum in order to exchange all of those ideas here at Skillshare. I want to actually tell you a quick story as to how the role of note-taking has had a strong impact in my career and also life. A few years ago, there was a project at work that really needed to be finalized, but it was also dependent on an important proposal and that proposal was not quite clear and it had had some false starts here and there, I'm sure you can maybe relate to this but I had been taking very careful notes and very focused notes using the strategies that I will share with you in this class. We were able to actually not only send the proposal along, it had many, many risks involved, I could not just come to the table, to the decision makers and say, I have a hunch that this will work based on this experience or that experience, those were isolated events. But the really focus notes helped me write a document that then finalized the goal for the project and it was finally approved. It was not only approved with flying colors, but it was also a model that was able to be replicated afterwards. So if you are in the middle of a project that sounds a little similar, I think there's something in this class for you, or maybe if you are a student or an attorney or a teacher that maybe you take notes from conferences or from lectures and all of a sudden you open that notebook and you try to find something that you're looking for but all you see is really just words on a page. There's something for you in here as well. I would also like to welcome you to participate in some practice activities along the way. The biggest challenge around note-taking is, I think just about with every new scale, if this is a new skill for you or a new approach to this skill is to practice, practice, practice. At the end of every clip, I will have a short suggestion as to what you could do before you start the following clip and how to make the best use of what's being shared in each one by using a practice activity. At the very end, we will culminate the entire class with the final project, and I will explain that in more detail later. You can submit your ideas at any time. This is a very collaborative community and I can't wait to see and hear from you. Let's get started. 2. Activities and Final Project: Now let's talk a little bit about the final project time, the final project for this class is actually to create your notebook, and what we're going to do is at the end of every clip, as I mentioned before, there will be a practice activity. For every practice activity, there will be a suggestion that means the good, better and best kind of range. What that means is that when a good activity is suggested, it will be able to offer you the ability to pause. The closer you are to pausing sources of information or stories or lectures or whatever you can use to actually take notes and practice, it'll be closer to the ability to pause. The better recommendations will be around your favorite source, but that you can only pause ones. Then the best ones, the most challenging ones will be no pause. So maybe you can just get something from TV news, radio news, live talks, most stories. A website would be suggested for that, but something that is live and you do not have the ability to pause. After you complete all of the practice activities at the end of every clip, you can keep taking pictures and uploading them to Skillshare. Or you can take multiple pictures of multiple pages if you decide to create a project activity. Number one, but by two or three different versions, those are welcome as well. I do want to point out that even if you are a digital note-taker and you decide that you want to participate in this class and submit all of the activities in digital format the more the merrier. There's room for everyone. One important piece about this final project is you're going to develop a collection of three to five templates that you can share with us here, we will talk about a little bit about the role and the purpose that templates serve in the world of note-taking, but you will be creating your own the sky is really the limit. 3. Note Taking Tools: When it comes to writing tools, I tend to gravitate towards two main sources. One, is just a regular pencil for note-taking. I could just use a mechanical pencil or school pencil or drawing pencil. The only trick about the school pencil is I have to always remember to have my sharpener with me. Let's talk a little bit about erasers. If I am writing a word and all of a sudden I make a mistake, which happens pretty often. I tend to actually use the plastic eraser here on the left, and this one here is also widely used and this is called the sand eraser. The plastic eraser, what happens is let's just erase half of this word over here. It tends to just take care of the job pretty neatly. The sand eraser, I'm erasing pretty vigorously here and maybe you can or can't quite pick it up. There's a little bit of a residue here, so I tend to stay with a plastic eraser because it can take care of everything all at once. Then I can write over it, which happens pretty often. I just tried to avoid having a page full of residues here and there, only because for the most part when I take notes, I end up sharing it with either my team or a colleague, or even when I use it as a source of information, I would like to have a clean page so I don't get thrown off when I'm presenting. I tend to use this very fine tip marker here. If I need to just create sort of like a stronger line to write notes when I'm pretty confident and when I think that the note is getting close to permanent enough for me to keep or to share with others. It needs to be a little darker for the sake of copying. I also use this dual brush pen its' by Tombow. It has this thicker marker over on this side and this sort of like thin tip on the other side. What it does is, sometimes if I need to really box something in just to call my attention to it or just to really highlight the importance that it has in a note, it does the job pretty nicely. The best part is that it doesn't bleed on the other side. While the thin point one I can just add maybe something handles or highlighters as we're going to talk about later. Even though this course is only really focusing on paper note-taking, I would like to just point out is two things in terms of other tools. If you are a digital note-taker and you don't want to wait until the digital note-taking class comes right after this, but you're interested in the strategies, these are the two that I would recommend the most. I have used the Apple Pencil here and there. I still prefer to stay close to these. This is by Paper 53. This one here, there is a bamboo version of this one and there's also, I can't remember. This as new trend. This does the job really well. This is a very soft tip. You can actually just use it on the screen, on a touch screen. Then it also comes with a pen on the other side of the stylus. When it comes to paper, I tend to stay around three different types. One is just plain paper that gives me a little bit of freedom and it's a little bit more open than the other ones with guides and rulers. The other one that I feel very comfortable with is notebooks with graph paper. They actually help me when I need to draw lines, and I use them as guides, as does the line paper as well. Just a regular ruled school notebook type of it helps me as a guide. One of the other things that I used to use pretty often when I started taking more purposeful notes was the use of post-it notes. For example, I would take lots of notes on just individual post-it notes, and then would just put them on pages. Then when I would come back and then review my notes and I realize or maybe actually they're not quite in the right order, I would just reorder the Post-it Notes and then it will just go back to my notes and make them a little bit more permanent, but they helped me a lot in the beginning. It's a really nice tip to keep in mind when we're just trying to change our note-taking system or adding something to our repertoire. 4. Who Takes Notes & Why Take Notes: When we talk about notes, two groups come to mind. Who is it that really takes notes and why actually does this group take notes? Why are notes so important in our lives? Let's think about some of the people that actually take notes on a regular basis. Now, let's think about why these people take notes, of course, for a variety of different reasons. Each one of these people and there's many more. We'll take notes with a different purpose in mind. Let's imagine that a student, for example, will take notes because he or she needs to understand the content and even though also on this page, there are many different reasons that were left out of this page. There are actually two fundamental reasons that guides the reasoning behind why people actually take notes. I've added these on either end because all of these reasons actually can belong to this group or that group. One is to outsource our memory to notes or paper and the other one is to make content explicit for future use. It is super important to make notes serve this purpose in a clear easy fairly accessible way. 5. Strategies - Part 1: Let's begin with some strategies that I have out here that will be very helpful for us to think about now, writing information in space. One of the first things that I like to start with, is always start with the title. Right here in this note you can see note-taking strategies. Then I will just go ahead and start taking my notes. In this case, I could just box my entire title in. A wonderful segway to this second strategy, which is to use lines, shapes, and arrows. This helps notes come to life really, really well. I will give you an example. In this page, I needed to remember what to say during a conference. Also, I was preparing my notes, but also getting ready to talk to quite a few people about note-taking strategies. This gave me a hint, that on page 8 in this book, I had more strategies to share. If you look at the lines, they compact the information. Arrows, they always point and they give an idea of process. I was not stuck. I remember that it will start here. I read from left to right, but I remembered that this would actually follow to this. Then the shapes really, really help. I could have actually had circles over here, but the shapes help chunk the information and contain the notes so you can actually share them more easily. The next tip that I would like to share with you is the rule that connectors and separators play in notes. I will start by separating these notes with a line and things that connect our lines attached to shapes. Even if you are separating separate concepts, but if they are in the same box, or in the same thumbnail, or in the same table, they are still connected. There's an underlying topic that's connecting them. But if you're going to separate them, then there is no line to join. Even if you are talking about four topics that are somewhat related, if you really want to separate them, then don't join them. Just leave them separated the way they are. A wonderful way to separate topics also is, let's imagine that there's a title over here and then you separate them. You clearly separate them by the title over here. T charts are also wonderful to separate them or to compare them. But these are great ways to actually add to your notes in a way that's easier for you to go back to and then be able to then study, review, remember, and report out. One other strategy that I think it's very, very important, let's imagine that you are taking notes and the speaker is speaking a mile a minute and it's hard for you at first right there, impromptu, on the spot, to remember what's more important than what. Leave space open. Because maybe the speaker will be talking about something down here and there is something that he or she says that's related to up here and you have this open space here to then go back to and be able to add, take out, even if you just want to use this empty space to then create those connections that are so important to help your memory retrieve information. You can just have one big arrow over here. Then this concept will go down to something that the speaker said over here. Then there's something else important here. But if you don't have this space, if your notes are all just crammed in one space, it'll be really, really hard for you to connect later. For example, when I originally took these notes, all of this was empty. I did not even know that this was going to show up during the conversation, but I had a lot of space to play with. It was the same over here. If I did not leave this piece over here available, I would have not had the space to write these three very important tips that came from an important talk. One other important tip is to use thumbnails for topics. Let's imagine that the topic is pizza. Someone is talking about the different kinds of pizza bread that you can use, whether it's flat bread, and they offer recipes. Immediately, my tendency is actually to just create boxes. Even if it's something that they don't get into it, it's crusty, it's soft, and it is sweet. Later on they were going to give you some information about that. Then I can always add over here and again, leaving space between these over here. This was our previous tip. If you leave space over here, you cannot go wrong. Use lots of space. Then you can also add information here, and here, and here, and here. Speakers are not always going to be as organized as we want them to be. As helpful it would be to have their ideas all condensed and organized in a sequential order, this is not a linear process. So if you leave space, you're also leaving yourself a lot of room for flexibility, and this is very, very helpful. Let's talk about the visual Alphabet by Sunny Brown. She wrote a wonderful book called The Doodle Revolution. I have used her visual alphabets to help me with my notes. It's added so much to the way that I condense information, but also the way I design titles and then they're ready to be shared with my team. Let me draw here her visual alphabet. All right. As you can see here, what I was trying to do was really to chunk the information. I did this on purpose because chunking the information doesn't only mean chunking a group of words, it can be just chunking the information. This is actually the point, the line, angle, et cetera. Each one of these serves a different purpose, and it's up to you to use your creative mind and creative note-taking to then discover the different ways that you could use this visual alphabet. 6. Strategies - Part 2: There are quite a few examples here that I chose to show you how to adapt the visual alphabet by Sonny Brown into ways of chunking information and highlighting portions of your notes. The first one over here, when you see the title, there's a rectangle around the title. When you use something like this to highlight important information, you have a line and you have an angle right here, and you have a line right here. Topic titles, you'll have the cloud, and you have the checklist, you have brackets. We're going to talk about visual highlighters next. When you want to represent ideas and they have an idea of process, for example, you can easily use a loop over here and use shapes. In this case it's the rectangular or square. We can use either, they interchange. This is just a sideways house to represent a process or maybe a step process or maybe a point scale or a point system. This is the eye, one of the eyes that then translates into something for your eyes actually to gravitate towards, maybe there's important information over here, here, and here. Another way to use lines as well as to use this as a cascade. To represent ideas that are grouped together. For example, when I was talking about the good, better, best system that I'm using for us to talk about practice activities at the end of every clip, if you notice I'm using that cascade that's just made with lines, but it gives me an idea of, first of all, I'm connecting them and not separating them, and I'm also keeping them within a certain system and it's easy for me to remember which ones belong where. Now let me show you how this works, with just real live notes. When I took a workshop offered by Skillshare a few weeks ago, this is how I took my notes while they were speaking, and even here is just a line with one word highlighted. They are talking about the same thing, teaching benefits and basics. Then over here, I go here and then I highlight the basics. This tells me that they're talking about something over here that's not related to something over there. Finally, to take a look at one more way to enhance our notes and to look at titles and how they can really pop other than just drawing a square around the words, is to use what I call the visual highlighters. For example, even with different words listed on a page, you can actually come up with different ways of highlighting the words if they mean something different in a note. In this case, I'm going to use a darker color just so it can really highlight what the difference between each one. We can use waves with this first one here. It just makes the ward standout. We can use sticks. We can use knobs next to the words. We can use brackets like we saw in the note before. We can use this thunder or lightning. This really calls for action or attention or something else, and we can use handles like I used in most of the titles. This really gives the word like a special place on the paper. One thing that I wanted to say, is even though these look really interesting and they do serve a purpose, especially when you are organizing your notes to make sure that you can share them with an extra way of showing your viewer. For example, I did this with the word "WELCOME" in many different ways. I would not have a variety of these on one page. I think what it can do if you just use all of them at once, it can just be too much or little confusing or it draws attention to the wrong part of your note and you really, really want to make sure that your notes are clear for those who are reading your notes. But most especially to in your case, if you are sharing your notes, if you are using those notes as a guide or a reference for presenting, you really want to make sure that your ideas just flow. Now, let's see what this really looks like in practice. This looks like just a standard PowerPoint slide that you would actually see at a meeting somewhere or in your school, in your graduate school. In my case, this was actually part of a meeting that I had to go to in order to understand the process that these business men and women were using, based on user-centered design theory, where their product went from conception to the consumers hands. This was all fine and dandy, and at the very beginning of the meeting, what they asked us to do was to just really take all of those notes and copy those notes, and then everyone was voraciously copying the notes. I only did this here for the sake of illustrating my point. But I was actually not interested in the notes. They're fairly easy to understand. What I did instead was, my notes actually start right here. This is the title for that talk, the product iterative process and how they made sure that this process was a predictable process, and this is how they used in their company to test software among their users. So they went through this process. I just really paid attention to some of the keywords that they had. They would start the process by inventing something and then they would just take the early stage ideas and then they would just turn them into demos. From that, they would actually advertise and sample their product through conference forums. Through the conference forms that would then get feedback from those first testers. Then they would then improve the prototype based on the feedback. They would then use early adopters that would then return their idea of how the product really worked or didn't work through feedback, and then after this second stage over here, they would come up with a standard product and then they were just then deploy to the customer's hands. This was a very easy process to draw and to then report back. But I don't think that without these note taking strategies, I would have been able to have a very concise and clear idea when I return back to my group. 7. Strategies - Part 3: Okay, I wanted to share just one last example. This example comes from a talk that actually happened at the Harvard Law School where Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was there and they were talking about the importance of civics in education. Please let's be honest. If you look at a note that looks like this, it's incredibly complicated and hard to go back to it and really make sense as to where the start is and where the end is. And so what this note actually looks like is right here. I'm using the same principles that we've talked about so far. So I actually was able to, at the very start, isolate it by giving a title to it, and I used lines to actually give an idea of what the main ideas were from that talk. The speakers are listed over here and then they each had a quote that came from their participation. And this was really the summary of this talk. One more last strategy that I would like to share here is how I make use of templates, how I create my own templates for note-taking. I use this approach, especially, when I'm working with teams that are going to be meeting over time and frequently. So for example, if I know that our team has a clear focus and it's going to be working on, for example, the development of lessons or modules, then it becomes fairly familiar for the instructor I'm working with, the multimedia team, and all the ones involved, in knowing what to look for. So the information is the same, it's consistent, and we can just keep going every week and know how to just flow and not have to be concerned about reading new notes every time. In this case, for example, if I have a working session, there are quite a few decisions that get made, and then I have a space here that's reserved for what I call parking lot items. And those items are translated into action items that then, at the next meeting, we will start from where we left off and then their new parking lot items generated. When the team is looking at these notes, which get also posted and shared among all the members, they know exactly what to look for. If there's someone who we decided to be responsible for some action item to be completed, then this is where they go for that. This one here, for example, I make use of loops instead of bullet points, and every time an item is completed, then I go and fill in or I can just X out that item. It doesn't really matter. It's whatever works for you. I sometimes just try to just be as practical as possible. So this is a planning session and we need to know what steps are involved in this planning session. If I know that the meeting will involve planning sessions, multiple planning sessions, then I would use this type of template. So this is a processed template, and I just wanted to show these to you because as part of your final project, I wanted you to just create what comes to mind, what really meets your needs and whatever you are. If you are an artist, if you are a skills share teacher, if you are just trying to develop templates that you want to use in your everyday life. This one here, for example, was an interesting one. I was working with an attorney who was teaching some legal studies where I work and one of the things that she shared was that fairly often she would work with her client and she would just end up with a page filled with running notes. And then we developed this template for her. And she was fairly happy about just using this space, just with the client's name, the date so she could keep track of all of these things. And just chunk. As I said from the beginning, chunk the information so it would be easier to access. And then she would use multiple pages using that, if it's a process meeting and so forth and so on. So I hope you enjoy developing your own template and I really cannot wait to see what you share. 8. Make Your Own Notation: This is my favorite part of the class. This is when we get to really be creative and we put all the pieces together, and your job will really be to develop your own notation. One of the things that I like to be when I'm developing my own style or notation is to just completely go out of the box. So let's imagine that we were staying with waves in this and that. Maybe my style is a little bit brighter than waves. Again, the secret is to keep it consistent, but maybe I actually prefer to have something like suns or a hot spots to call attention to points over here. It works really well. If, again, if it's being consistent and this is a color that actually goes with who I am. I would prefer to see something like that then those pastel colors, it's really your style. So needless to say, the practice activity after this video is to really create a number of different notation styles and share them in the group. Choose three favorite ones and practice, practice, practice. Take notes sometimes from commercials. Commercials are perfect for practicing note-taking because they're typically between 15 seconds and 30 seconds long. Typically the 50 second ones move very fast. They are actually created that way because by the third or fourth second there quickly. If the commercial is not very good, they're losing the viewer. So it's a great way for you to try to beat the clock and then get that information. If this stresses you out, then don't do it. Choose something a little bit longer or maybe a sound by, and then after you create your notation, you just create templates with them. 9. Using Color: Now, a few brief notes around using color in notes. As I have said before, I tend to just really stay as close as possible to less is always more. Even if I'm writing a title, and even in this case where I have a cloud is just that one color, for the sake of consistency, I will also just stay with it right here. Even if I'm writing a different title and it says light colors, I would stay away in terms of the design, I would stay away from yet another cloud, and I would really keep it for titles only. But in this case, if I'm just going to maybe have a little sample of light colors down here, I would just quickly, just lightly do something like that. Light colors, and then to stay with the theme. Dark colors, I would do the same thing. The role of color is really to bring information up to your eyes very quickly. But here is a question that I really get from people a lot. What happens if you don't have a marker on you right when you're taking notes? You can always review your notes later, which is a process that typically happens. You take notes, you review the notes, and then you share the notes. But even if you're reviewing your notes, but you still don't have that color available, then what do you do? Well, there is this really fun tip that I have discovered over time. Nothing new. A lot of sketchers and drawers do that, but I'm not a sketcher or a drawer, but typically you can use that one shade and then use it in many different ways. For example, if I'm using it to highlight a word, I will just draw over it until it's a little darker than usual, and then I would write the word right over here in the middle. If I have many arrows and then I have this main arrow over here, this is great. But maybe actually I want to highlight one arrow more so than the others. I will go over here, I can darken the lines, but maybe the darkened lines, this is still just not good enough. I'll just come over here and lightly just add a little bit of a filling in it. Same thing with what if I want to just call someone's attention to something? Lightly fill in light fillers right over here and maybe not all the way, maybe just half. Before we close this clip, I would like to actually come back to this page that we visited earlier in this class. I left it empty, this side empty on purpose. Where all of the people who take notes for just like in the background. The most important part of this is, who really takes notes and it can be anyone, and it's not limited to these people. But let's imagine that this page looks like this. I considered myself to be a fairly color-happy person, but this is really too much. If I were at any given point required to talk about each one of these, I would have a hard time actually focusing on this note and remembering with any degree of accuracy, but most especially with being able to articulate really what I saw on the page. 10. Organizing Notes: Now it's time to wrap things up here by sharing with you how I organize my notes. This clip will focus on two different ways of looking at the notebook organization. One, is how to index your notes and how to find your notes. Here is actually my latest notebook, is the most current one that I'm using at work. I'm almost at the very end of it, but I wanted to show you how I organize my table of contents. It's where I always start. Before anything, when I buy a new notebook or when I started, whether it has a one topic focus or if it has multiple topics focus, which is what you see over here, is that I actually number all of my pages, all of them one by one. You can see that they have different ink colors or as the notes come along, I keep numbering them. You can find notebooks that are sold with page numbers on them already. Also, I have the freedom to sometimes number three or four pages with the same number, if I actually have a clear purpose for that and it just gives you more freedom. The first thing that I do, as I said, is I create a table of contents. In this case, I'm actually working on a project at the same time, even if these two one was postponed and other one is in late development. What you see here is, all of each project here has its own set of pages because I cannot section the book and it would be too cumbersome, what if one project needs more pages than the other and so forth and so on. Then I also create an extra section that I keep adding as I go along. One thing that I would like to tell you too is, I start my table of contents from the back of the book. The reason for that is that it just gives me a little bit more freedom to keep adding pages from the back to the front rather than the other way around. I might need more pages than I budget myself for or I might need less pages and then I end up with empty pages at the beginning. I want to give you an example of how handy actually this was. Not too long ago, one of our multimedia team specialists needed dates for a certain development meetings that we had with the company that we were working with. Isolate this here for a little bit, just for better viewing. Hopefully, you can see this here, they are divided by modules. We had isolated developments for these modules. One thing that this multimedia specialist needed was, she needed exact dates for when those meetings occurred. Of course, it took me less than even a minute. I went to the table of contents as you can see. To find out the dates for module one, I go to page 51, right here and here is the date, right there at the top. One thing that I wanted to also share, it's really cool tip that helped expedite my own ways of using notes, is that I actually create these groups that are paper clipped and then if I only want to focus on one topic, even though this notebook focuses on multiple topics, is I just go from one. It's still the same project; 44-50, 44-50, 44-50, and so forth and so on. Here it is for a multiple topic notebook. Now I want to share with you what I do with the simple topic notebooks. Again, I do number the pages. First time I get the book, I do create the table of contents from the back to the front. In this case, I had a brainstorming, so I was able to actually have two different sections for the book. It was very clear. I created all of the notes that I needed with corresponding pages. One thing that I tend to also add in notebooks that I keep going back and forth is I tend to use posted notes to organize my notes. This one here was important to me and this one here was important to me as well. I wanted to also show you that I tend to write on the spine of those notebooks what the topic is for that notebook. I also wanted to share with you what I have been doing. I will also submit to my own final project. Of course, I went to the back of the book and I created a table of contents. Take notes like you need them and the clip 1 notes are on page 1 and the practice activity, whoops, I forgot here, number one is on page 2 and then I'll keep filling this out as I progress. 11. Final Project & Final Notes: All right, this is it. I want to thank you so very much for all the collaboration and I want to wish you good luck with note taking and please remember, you're always welcome to keep submitting projects even after you've taken all of these videos and maybe you have a project that you are in the middle of it work and you would like to have our opinion or maybe feedback or maybe just a second pair of eyes, but I hope to see you maybe in a different class soon. Thank you.