Why You Should Take Digital Notes as an Engineering Student 

I totally agree, hand writing notes can have many benefits and should be utilised for learning new content. I also think muscle memory is an extremely important tool and plays a massive part in remember procedures. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Deepak! :)

Thank you! I’m glad you are liking it :)

It really does change the game! Good luck for the rest of the semester :)

Hi Julien, thanks for letting me know you like the videos, I am glad that I can help. Good luck with your first year engineering studies, you can do it! :)

Thanks George! I also wish that the technology was available earlier so that I could have started taking digital notes sooner. I now see school students as young as grade 3 having all their work that is being done in school completed on an iPad….. how awesome would it have been to look back on those days :)

Thanks again for another kind comment! :)

My pleasure, thanks for letting me know!

Thanks for sharing this :)

Hi Mahir, thanks for the suggestion! I will be making more study technique and note taking app reviews soon, stayed tuned :)

I use an app called Notability to do my calculations on an iPad. I find this app to be perfect for work related stuff. Notability and GoodNotes are very similar and I’ve used both but at the end of the day I choose Notability. You can download both Notability and GoodNotes for free and try them out. Hope this helps :)

When you were taking digital notes were you still handwriting them or were you typing them? Also I like the idea of scanning your notebook at the end of the semester and uploading to OneNote, keeps them safe and accessible :)

@BEng Hielscher I was using my tablet and handwriting them with onenote, while I have gotten more used to it when doing practice problems and such, I can never seem to stick with them when using it for notes.

Oh ok. Fair enough :)

As a fix I take pictures, put it in a pdf, then add text so I can search for topics

Hey thanks! Ah yes I’ve had this issue before. One solution that I’ve seen people do is to put a matte screen protector on their device. Give this a go :)

Thanks for the advice! I actually tested this with my matte laptop screen. The advantages I see is that the reflection is now blury so my eyes don't want to focus on the reflected ceilling light all the time. (The reflection also appears to be a bit less bright, but barely noticeable.) The disadvantage is that it's still a bright spot that's now covering a larger area of the screen becouse of the bluring effect. This means a smaller portion of the screen can be seen well. Increasing the brightness solved this, and now I can read the text directly in front of the reflection too, however it doesn't feel the best for my eyes. I also experimented with different background colours. With a black background, the reflection is noticable even with max brightness. With a white one the reflection fades away much more even at half brightness. At full, it almost disappears. Of course this decreases battery life though. In conclusion, I think, based on my tests, a matte screen cover, a white background and a bit more brightness might make this problem easier to live with, but I'm not sure if it's good for vision. What about your case, did you manage to solve this reflection issue or avoid it somehow?

Wow! Thanks for sharing this. You really have done some work on this! What I use to do to try and minimise the reflection is to adjust the angle my Microsoft surface pro was on so the light wasn’t in my eyes. Because the surface pro has a kickstand on the back you can get any angle you want which is helpful but at times this meant that it was not very ergonomic for my hand when writing.

@@BEngHielscher Happy to share my experience! :) I guess i'll just try to avoid it when it is possible. Getting used to it might be possible but might have an eye damaging effect. Im not an expert in this.

I personally would prefer using a tablet that’s more like a computer rather than a book. I think for students your money would be better spent on something like an iPad or Surface Pro because they are more versatile devices

I have played around with it a little bit but I want to spend some more time figuring it out because it seems like it could be a really useful app :)

@@BEngHielscher I use it for anything diagram related. The usage of layers, vector lines, and all the import addons is great. You can even export anything to DXF and CAD files. Its worth the price imo. That youtube channel Dazz uses it. a lot for examples. I personally use it to draw out ideas and free body diagrams and annotate over PDFs.

Oh cool! Yeah it definitely seems to be one of the superior technical drawings apps. I’ve heard a few people rave about it. Those features you are mentioning are some of the reasons I decided to try it out. I plan to spend some more time working out how to use all the features soon