Plug-and-Learn !

It’s time to take notes in a specific way that will help benefit you in the future with your difficult courses. I know for me note cards just isn’t my thing, so I would take all of my notes and just reread and review them, but that wasn’t and isn’t enough. Instead of just taking notes and rereading them as your study aid for exams, I am going to teach you something called Plug in Notes, that makes you do more with your notes towards helping make and prepare helpful reviewing guides. Through this you will come across some pictures I have uploaded to help all you visual learners out there understand and apply this easier! I strongly recommend you try this for specific classes that you feel are challenging and difficult, for me I used my CRS 287 class and my EAR 117 class.

Ok let’s start! So first, before class, make sure you go in knowing how you will be doing Plug in Notes, this is because you need to know how the set up is going to be while you are in class, and after class. So during class, you will be taking your normal notes that you feel comfortable taking and collect as much information as you can. Every time your professor starts on a new topic, skip around 10 lines in your notes. And continue this through the rest of class. After class, I recommend doing right when you are finished that way everything is still fresh in your head, go through each section of your notes that you left blank and fill it in with a graphic organizer based on the topic from your notes above.

I color coordinated my graphic organizers because I am a visual learner, so seeing the division and with colors helps me learn and feel more organized.Then when finished with that, for each course you took Plug in Notes for, on a separate sheet of paper, make a list of questions in a table form to help stay organized, you think are important and will appear of future exams, BUT DON’T ANSWER them YET!

When the week is over, and you begin your review then, WITHOUT your Plug in Notes right next to you, go through the questions you created and answer as many as you can. For each of the questions you couldn’t answer, make a star next to them, noting what you need to focus more heavily on for reviewing.Then, go ahead and review/use your notes to complete the questions you couldn’t before, it will be easy to find those answers because you split them up into sections with graphic organizers before! Make sure you spend extra time reviewing and learning the stared material!

And there you have it, now the material you know and don’t know is visually right in front of you, telling you what YOU personally need to spend more time on in order to be successful in that course. The nice thing about this it that it forces you to review the notes after you take them, which will only help the information to get implanted into your brain even more!!!

This strategy was particularly useful in the two courses I chose because of how many notes and topics we touch upon during class, and very importantly, they are both two classes with a heavy amount of hard information! So you generate and apply the information with notes of your own taken from class! And of course, you don’t have to follow my directions exactly, feel free to change some little things in ways that will help you learn better! Simple little things such as STARS can help, I know!!