The world has changed. Information is available at our fingertips, and it can be hard to keep up with the pace of change in this digital age. For many people, writing notes by hand is just too time-consuming.
Note-taking is an essential skill for a student. But it is not always enjoyable. Here, online note-taking tools come to the student’s rescue when there is no time for pen and paper. Note-taking tools aid in organizing notes. Note-taking tools are used by individuals who need to take structured notes while working on something. They can help sort information and organize our ideas.
Although note-taking is an important task, keeping up with notes and information while on the move can be difficult. Online tools, therefore, have the added benefit of helping us focus without the worry of having to note down things by writing.
Some various apps and websites can be used for quick notes taking on the go.
How does note-taking come in handy for students?
Note-taking is a great way to organize one’s thoughts before writing and can help focus on what one has to say. It also helps develop critical thinking skills by asking questions about the material presented. Note-taking has improved comprehension, which is a great advantage for a student.
Studies have indicated that notes taking have a positive impact on learning. The more students record the better they can remember.
While taking notes in class, the student notes down the important points or keywords. While studying when the student goes back to the notes taken, connecting and recalling information becomes easy through whatever one has understood. This stimulates active learning.
When students note down the keywords in a topic, they learn to recognize the most important learning from the topics which improves critical reasoning.
Below are some online note-taking tools that can be of help to a student
Online note-taking tools for students
1. Dictation.io
This is a software that uses speech recognition to write documents in Google Chrome. The software Dictation transcribes speech to text accurately. You can add paragraphs, punctuation marks, and even emojis using voice commands.
This software transcribes speech in many languages and is a very unique tool that students can use for note-taking. It accepts a variety of voice commands. For example, “New paragraph” to move the cursor to the next paragraph or “Smiling Face” to insert 🙂 smiley.
2. Mindmeister
Mindmeister combines the popular mind mapping concept with the ability to share ideas and collaborate with others via a word processing tool. Mind mapping helps the student organize the study tasks into smaller goals. Mindmeister is very useful for taking notes in class or writing an essay or research paper. It offers students a creative way to organize their thoughts. Mindmeister has a free, limited basic plan and a reduced-cost option for students.
3. Diigo
The research that school students are doing is mostly on the web. At times they might want to highlight the info or take notes in the margin, just as they can with textbooks or their notebooks. Diigo helps exactly with this. It provides a digital highlighter and sticky notes on any web page that will be bookmarked and stay there for future use. Students can share the pages with others and save and organize their research work. They can go back to the notes, the annotations, and highlighted areas whenever needed.
4. Live Binders
This free online tool allows students to create virtual binders to keep their resources organized for school. It also offers to collaborate and share easily so students can work together with other classmates. Students, as well as parents and educators, can create a binder for a specific topic and then collect and organize all their web resources and links in one easy-to-find place. The files can be organized with a display of tabs and sub-tabs that make it easy to refer to later.
5. Rapid tables
The rapid tables have many tools and tables based on various subjects that are of great use to a student. Some of the tools are font tools, pdf tools, electronics tables, math tables, and ecology. An online calculator makes math tasks easy. It is a colorful interface that appears like a page from a notebook, which makes it interesting to use. This tool makes note-taking easy and helps to calculate and convert values too.
6. OCRSpace
OCRSpace is a completely free and online Optical Character Recognition service. Using OCRSpace is easy. You have the option to upload a file from your computer or to use the URL from a website that features an image. You can also drag and drop your file.
It accepts the most commonly used image formats. If your image isn’t orientated correctly, then OCRSpace can reorient the image for you, and if the image is low quality or small, OCRSpace can automatically improve it for you. It converts the image texts that may sometimes seem difficult to read, into readable normal text. This feature can particularly be helpful for children with special needs where a handwritten text can be converted into a text which can be read with greater ease.
7. Pote
Pote is an online text editor. A bright and colorful UI is very different from most online text editors. Pote allows its users to compose and edit text documents using just a Web browser. All documents are stored on the Pote server. This site requires account registration before you can get started. After signing up, you’ll need to sign in each time you wish to use the platform.
There are options for changing the font style and color of your notes, as well as the window size, page background, and notepad platform color. You can choose to email your notes or print them out directly from the platform.
8. Hypothesis
This is a chrome extension that can be used to annotate the web. One can select texts to annotate and save them privately or share. It also enables OCR Pdfs. The user has to log in and then has access to all the group annotations and private annotations. The student can Collaboratively annotate, highlight, and tag web pages and PDF documents. Hypothesis helps to hold discussions, read socially, organize your research, and take personal notes on webpages, PDFs, and EPUBs.
Conclusion
To wrap up, these were some interesting note-taking tools for students. Although many prefer the traditional pen and paper, this method is not always feasible. With the advancement in technology, using easier methods is a favorable option. Note-taking tools are useful for many reasons. They can help one organize thoughts and keep them in one place for later reference. They also make it easy to share notes with colleagues and get feedback from tutors on assignments. In the end, note-taking is a personal thing. Everybody has different styles and preferences for taking notes in class, but it is important to do what works for them.
Finally, there’s nothing wrong with using these products if they help you focus on the task at hand.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,