As I made my way to my first Monday lecture freshman year, I carried both a notebook and a laptop in my backpack. And as I fidgeted among hundreds of other students waiting to hear my professor speak, my notebook sat on the desk in front of me. I handwrote all my notes that first freshman semester. But as I watched my classmates watch Netflix, online shop, and browse the depths of Facebook on their laptops during class, I couldn’t help but be tempted. By the time I came back this fall as a sophomore, I didn’t carry a single notebook to class.
Professors move fast. In some of my classes, my professor will cover the entirety of a chapter in one or two lectures alone. It’s hard to keep up. Laptops make sense; I can type way faster on my laptop than I can copy down the notes by hand. But is the use of laptops in classrooms beneficial to students? Well for starters, laptops are incredibly distracting. I type the notes as fast as I can then I fly back to my email or a different assignment for a different class. And since I’ve copied all the required notes down, I always miss the supplemental material the professor explains. This doesn’t seem so helpful when it comes time for studying for the exam. I think this is where the fundamental difference lies between taking notes on a laptop or taking notes by hand. Taking notes by hand forces you to pay attention to what is really being said. Notes on your laptop will have all the material verbatim, that’s for sure, but then when it comes time to study for the exam later, that might be the very first time you are actually seeing the material even if you’ve yet to miss a lecture. This will be the first time you are attempting to process the material and commit it to your memory and may ultimately lead to a college student’s worst nightmare--having to cram for an exam and having absolutely no idea what any of the material means.
It’s elementary that students attend lectures to take notes and do well on the exams of projects. Students want to succeed; then why not give yourself the best possible chance at doing well by unplugging from technology for the duration of the class and taking the notes by hand? It’s such a simple change that can make a huge difference when it comes to all the studying later.
