(Photo Illustration by Michael Danser)
Gone are the days of highlighting key phrases in used textbooks, underlining pertinent facts in notes, and doodling hearts and stars on the corners of lecture notes.
There is a new way to keep all your class notes and textbooks in order: simply turn on your computer and you’re ready to start your studying.
With new technology, such as the newly released iPad, targeting the average college students’ needs, note-taking software and class textbooks are becoming available for direct download to your computer.
Is this upcoming transition from the pen and paper to newer technology surprising? Or is it just the next logical step for the information-filled world in which we live?
Walking into any college classroom, it is common to find most students with their laptops on desk, ready to document the day’s lecture notes. Some university majors are even encouraging this trend by requiring students to have a laptop to declare a specific major.
Alongside the university’s technical evolution, Microsoft Word has developed a new program that allows students to take notes on a screen that looks like a spiral notebook.
One feature of this program is that students can audio record their professors’ lectures, subdivide notes by class, and even draw pictures on the notebook itself with the scribble function.
Not only is the way students take notes evolving, but the method of reading our textbooks is too. Many new textbooks are available in a downloadable format that downloads directly to your Kindle, laptop or nook. These programs allow you to take notes, highlight quotes, and tag page numbers with a click of a button.
With programs such as these, students are shifting toward this new technology for the ease and features that a pen and paper can provide.
Jordan Rutledge, an SMU sophomore, is one student who is in for the change.
“I use my computer because in class the professors speak so fast it is hard to write down everything they say,” she said. “By having my computer, I can neatly write down everything they say.”
Other students, such as SMU sophomore Amanda Snider, prefer the notebook and pen note-taking method for all its simplicity.
“I’ve developed my own note-taking style over the years and I really don’t want to change it,” Snider said. “Also, I would feel tempted to check my Facebook or e-mail if I had a computer in class, so this way I can stay focused and on task.”
While there are some students on campus who would like to use computers in the classrooms, their majors make it difficult to do so, because taking notes on a computer could be a disadvantage to their learning.
Madeline Smith, an SMU first year, believes that note-taking apart from the pencil and paper would be difficult.
“I would love to be able to take notes on my computer, but engineering majors can’t really do that,” she said. “We have equations and math problems that computers don’t have the programs to write out efficiently. It is just easier to write them out with a pencil and paper.”
So what is the next logical step in this technology march? Will technology catch up and allow students to transfer their own unique note-taking style to their computer, or will new programs evolve for engineering and math majors’ needs?
It is not to hard to imagine a semester without fighting in line at the bookstore, trading in your old books and wincing at the cost of your new ones. You will simply click on a few links and download them direct to your laptop.
