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Lifelong learning with the iPad Pro - An interview with Joyce Mount
Learning is about reaching your full potential and constantly adding to your knowledge. Read how 75 years old Joyce Mount uses our app GoodNotes on the iPad Pro to engage in lifelong learning activities and manage all study materials in a single place.
Hi Joyce, please tell us a little bit about yourself
I am 75 years old and initially trained as a secretary. At the age of 25, I left my job and trained as a teacher. I have worked in comprehensive schools, but most of my career I worked as a lecturer in a college. In the early 1980s I was trained on an IBM Clone with 4 other members of staff and since then concentrated on teaching word processing, spreadsheets, and databases. I wrote all my own teaching materials and had 4 books on Information Technology published by McGraw Hill. I retired at 50 to become my mother’s carer. I was very involved in marking examination papers for OCR.
Since when are you using GoodNotes for learning and how did you discover it?
I discovered GoodNotes when I bought an iPad Pro 12.9” and an Apple Pencil. I wanted an app on which I could take notes. I tried several, but GoodNotes came top by a mile.
How are you using GoodNotes and how has it influenced your life?
I enjoy studying and am very interested in Rome and Ancient Greece. I decided to teach myself Latin and Greek. I bought a number of Open University course materials through University Booksearch - I did not take the courses but studied the materials on my own. I needed an app to take notes for these materials and for the Latin and Greek. So I take notes. I have made up a number of forms in Pages and have set them up as templates to enable me to practice such things as declensions, conjugations etc. It is now my main app on the iPad.
Do you have any tips & tricks with GoodNotes you'd like to share?
One of the additional ways I use GoodNotes is as an indexing facility for PDFs. I transfer a pdf to GoodNotes, insert bookmarks for relevant items, then take a screenshot of the list of bookmarks and insert it on a sheet of plain paper at beginning of the pdf. I also put covers on everything so that they are instantly recognizable.
What would be different if you weren't using GoodNotes?
Before using GoodNotes I was working with pen and paper - the piles were mounting up - filing and storage were becoming a problem as well as the expense of buying paper. The more I had the longer it took me to find what I wanted. I found GoodNotes - scanned all my notes and now everything is stored digitally - very easy to find and saving a number of trees into the bargain.
Joyce creates custom note-taking paper templates and forms with Pages and saves them as PDF to use them in GoodNotes
GoodNotes 4 is the ideal app for learners of every age to store and annotate all their study material in a single place. Stop digging through piles of paper and get GoodNotes instead. It is available on the App Store for iPad and iPhone.
6 great examples on how to use the iPad‘s drag & drop feature to boost your productivity
Apple has done an incredible - even though not flawless - job with iOS 11 and the drag & drop feature. The whole operating system feels more integrated because your apps are not strangers anymore. We can see an increasing level of compatibility. Finally, you can use and apply all the gestures with your fingers that Steve Jobs would have loved.
Working on an iPad is much more intuitive nowadays. In some of our recent articles, we have covered great drag & drop interactions that make it possible to add a screenshot of any PDF page as a new notebook in GoodNotes, or even to drag handwritten notes to other apps where they will appear as typed text. So far, most of the tips & tricks on how to use drag & drop in iOS 11 have been pretty much about sending files and documents back and forth between apps. Yet, with drag and drop, you can do a lot more to increase your paperless productivity. Check out these 6 creative workflows:
1. Drag your handwritten meeting notes into your task manager to add a to-do
In an earlier article on our blog, we covered how to convert handwriting to text and then export the to-do item to Trello. With drag and drop, this is now much more straightforward and intuitive. Take this example: You just finished a meeting where you have discussed the first results of your new content marketing strategy and you have taken a bunch of notes on your iPad using GoodNotes. The notes include some tasks that you want to work on in the next days. To remember them, you want to add them to your task-manager Sorted. With iOS 11, this is as easy as it gets. Open your meeting notes and bring in your to-do app in split view. Select the handwritten to-dos and draw a circle around them using the lasso tool. Now you can drag the selection over to the other app and - POP - they will show up as a new task in your inbox. Notice how even bullet lists and emojis convert!
2. Share annotated photos and sketches via email
Picture this: You moved into your new flat and sit in your living room staring at the blank wall in front of you. Suddenly, it hits you. How cool would it be if you had your own fireplace right at that spot? Of course, you want to tell your wife, or roommate, or mom or anyone about that but you really want to convince them. So what do you do? You pick up your iPad and take a photo of the wall. Fortunately, you already had a notebook in GoodNotes to collect interior design inspiration. Then, you can visualize your new idea with a few quick strokes using your stylus. Again, you can pick up the photo AND the annotations you made and drop it into the mail draft that you bring in using slide over. Almost magically, the background is being removed but the annotations stay in place. Sure, within a few weeks you will have that fireplace making your living room a bit more cozy for wintertime.
3. Prepare graphics for your Keynote and PowerPoint presentations
Didn‘t we all face that problem before? You‘re working on that important presentation for school or the next meeting but you just can‘t get the last graph right. Somehow, the alignment is always off. It can't be too hard right? Every four year old could draw that... So why don‘t you do it as well? Use GoodNotes, or any other iPad notes or sketching app to draw that graph. Then, drag it over to the presentation where it appears as an image. Some things are still a lot easier using your hands because they are "the most natural and direct pointing device" as Steve Jobs would have said.
4. Create URLs from Tweets
How in the world could a social network make use of drag and drop if it wasn‘t for sharing images and videos? Well, the folks at Twitter actually have done a pretty good job. You can drag out any tweet from the Twitter app on your iPad and drop it somewhere else, for example in a note in Bear. This will generate the URL to that particular tweet, making it easy to recall or share it later.
5. Drag a phone number from your notes to contacts and convert it to text
RING RING “Who‘s there?... Yes... Yes... Hold on, let me grab a piece of paper real quick, I‘m writing it down.“
Does that sound familiar to you? Handwriting is still king when it is important to focus on other things like paying attention to your dialog partner who is dictating you a very important phone number. In iOS 11 on your iPad, you can drag and drop the phone number over to your contacts. Thanks to GoodNotes‘ powerful handwriting to text engine, it will appear as typed text. Notice how it is being recognized, even though the note is not written completely straight.
6. Open links from your notes in the right app
Okay, this use case might be a bit far-fetched but we wanted to share it anyway. It shows what kind of things are possible with drag and drop on your iPad and provides a peek into the future of handwriting.
Imagine you visited a conference, say the recent Release Notes Conference in Chicago. You listen to the speakers and some of them were so inspiring that you want to follow them on Twitter afterward. Like every speaker nowadays, they have included their Twitter handles in their slide-deck. Since you want to keep all the notes of the conference in a single notebook for easy reviewing, you decide to also write down the URLs to the speakers‘ Twitter profiles. Using the app Opener, you can drag the handwritten links into it and open them in the suggested app right away, without going through Safari or another browser.
We hope that these tips help you to discover more creative solutions to integrate drag and drop in your daily workflows. If you want to stay up to date on the latest trends, tips, and tricks on paperless productivity, subscribe to our monthly newsletter.
Here are a few more articles like this one
How to take paperless document management to the next level with drag & drop
How to print fewer emails in your office
Our App GoodNotes 4 is the perfect app for drag and drop. It has never been easier to collect all your formerly paper-based documents and information by dragging them into your document library where you can annotate and manage them. Thanks to the app‘s powerful OCR technology, you can drag your handwritten notes to other apps where they will automatically convert to typed text or an image, depending on what the receiving app is accepting. This allows building powerful and amazing workflows around something as simple as handwritten notes.
GoodNotes is available on the App Store for iPad and iPhone.
The outline method is perhaps one of the most common, but still one of the best note-taking systems. Probably, you have been using it before, maybe without even knowing it had a name. Nevertheless, it doesn‘t hurt to add another essential method to your skill set that allows to take great notes in school and college or even in meetings. With this method, your notes and thoughts are organized in a structured and highly logical manner, which drastically reduces the editing and reviewing time. No wonder that Oxford Learning rates the method as best for “Easily creating study questions for review“.
How it works
Naturally, people use bullet points, numbered lists, or arrows to indicate a new thought. Every major topic of the lecture or meeting will be placed farthest to the left of the page. Subtopics will be added using an indent to the right. Each supporting fact or note is placed below the subtopic, using another indent. This way, the notes add a great structure to the whole lecture or meeting making it easy to review them after.
Advantages
As stated above, the outline method reduces the time needed to edit and review notes which is useful if you need to digest a lot of information in a short time. It does not only show the main points of the lecture or meeting but also shows the relationship between the single items. Since it follows a relatively strict framework this method allows you to focus on your lecture instead of needing to spend to much time getting your notes right.
Disadvantages
Where there is light, there is also shadow. The outline note-taking method has its disadvantages: For classes that require you to write a lot of formulas and graphs like math or chemistry, other note-taking systems like Cornell notes are superior.
Why you should write notes longhand
Sure, at first the outline method might appear ideal for using a computer with any word processing program, but we still recommend writing your notes longhand. Science has proven that you‘re able to remember handwritten notes a lot better compared to typed notes and there are a few more general reasons why handwriting is superior. One of the biggest advantages of the outline method is that it is super easy to review the notes. When you write them down by hand and review them, it is much more flexible. You can draw arrows and lines connecting thoughts from different subtopics and add comments to the side. If you want to take your handwritten notes on an iPad, apps like GoodNotes offer a few more benefits. For example, you can reorder written words on the page after you have written them down. This way, a subtopic can become a main topic if you have identified a higher importance during the review.
Thanks to its ease of use and benefits, the outline method is ideal to ensure educational success.
More articles you might like:
The best way to take notes as a student
Note-taking on the iPad - Using the “Boxing Method“
Our app GoodNotes 4 is an outstanding note-taking app for the iPad. It is the perfect app to use with the Apple Pencil but it supports a lot of other styluses. It‘s minimalistic and distraction-free design lets you focus on your lectures or meetings. GoodNotes lets you search your handwritten notes, which is ideal for reviewing them. It is available on the App Store.
Note-taking on the iPad: How to use the “Boxing Method”
You might have heard about the outline method or the Cornell note-taking technique but most likely you have never heard about the “Boxing Method“. This note-taking system has been invented by our user Amber, who is a Dutch university student. On her Instagram account, she shares great tips and inspiration about studying with an iPad. In the short guest article below, Amber explains how the method works and how she uses it to study with an iPad.
The Boxing Method by @ipadstudying
I have been told that the method I am using to take notes in class is quite new. I call it the boxing method. Each section of my study notes that should be grouped together gets a box around it. For lectures, this would mean every (few) slide(s) and for articles, this would mean every (few) paragraph(s).
How To Do It
I start taking notes just like most people would: in two columns, dividing each part with headings. However, when I am done with reading, or after class, I start drawing the boxes: I use the lasso tool in GoodNotes to move the sentences around a bit and then draw a box around every part using the automatic shape recognition in GoodNotes, which helps me draw perfect shapes. It is even easier if you use quad ruled or dotted paper.
Advantages
This method has a few advantages, apart from looking aesthetically pleasing, of course:
I think about and read my notes twice, once when writing them and once more when putting them into boxes.
As a visual thinker, it is convenient to have notes on different topics separated. It helps you remembering and recalling them easier at the right times.
When studying, it is easy to focus on one box at a time.
My notes are much more concise, as I don’t want my boxes to be too long or wide.
You can use your space much more efficient than when you use ruled/quad ruled paper.
It makes moving notes around very easy.
This method has been working really well for me, so I hope other people will benefit from this too. I would love to see some pictures of people using this method, so tag me (@ipadstudying) and @goodnotesapp in pictures of your notes on Instagram!
Drag & Drop - Take Paperless Document Management & Annotation to the Next Level
After introducing some of the amazing new features that were made possible in GoodNotes thanks to iOS and it‘s major addition of drag & drop, we‘re now ready to announce part 2 of “Leveraging your paperless note-taking and document management with drag & drop in GoodNotes“. A lengthy title, but we guess you get it.
Drag & drop has been outstanding so far. Never before has it been easier to grab documents from a variety of sources and just drop them all into your GoodNotes library where you can annotate and organize them easily so that they‘re always with you. Just tap and hold on the document that you want to share and start dragging it to another app as soon as it lifts. You can also hold onto a document while you flick up your finger to reveal the dock and easily switch to GoodNotes. Release your finger and the document will be right in your library - ready for annotation & markup. That is only one way how you can use drag & drop with GoodNotes. Here are a few more things that are now possible:
1. Dragging images and pictures from Photos to GoodNotes
Let's say you‘re thinking about what you want to experience during your next vacation. See the Colosseum and relieve how gladiators have fought during the Roman empire? Visit the Pyramids of Gizeh in Egypt? Or enjoy the gorgeous view from Victoria Peak of one of the world‘s most beautiful skylines in Hong Kong? A digital travelers journal is the perfect place to plan trips like that and collect inspiration. With drag & drop, you can now easily add images from a variety of sources to your digital journal. It is pretty much like your mom's old photo albums, where she used to stick in Photos and write a few lines - just for the digital world.
Dragging images to the page from the Photo app. High-quality photos may take some time to load :-)
2. Drag a screenshot to the page and add it as an image
With iOS 11, Apple has introduced a completely new and improved way of dealing with screenshots. When you‘re taking a screenshot by pressing the home button and the lock button of your device simultaneously, a small preview will appear in the bottom left of the screen so that you can start editing it right away. If you don‘t do anything with it, it will save to Photos after a few seconds. Now here‘s the cool part: This screenshot can be dragged as well, right from the preview! Say you're studying a book for school or university and you need to take notes on it. Suddenly, you come across a super important page that you really want to remember. With GoodNotes, iOS11 and drag & drop it is super easy to add this page right to your notebook to annotate it: Take a screenshot and start dragging the preview. Hold on to it and switch to another open tab in GoodNotes lift your finger and the page will be right there as an image. Easy as that!
It is like tearing off a book page, magically making it smaller and then gluing it into your notebook.
3. Create a new document from a dragged photo
Sometimes drawing a picture is the easiest way of explaining things to other people. So skip the back-and-forth-emails to communicate with your co-workers and just watch:
Annotating an image to make your ideas crystal clear when forwarding it to others
Of course, you can also use the newly introduced annotation feature of iOS 11 to markup the image and then forward it to your co-worker via email. However, with GoodNotes we want to offer a solution to keep all your documents securely stored in a single place. Especially when working on projects, you may want to have all necessary information at hand. GoodNotes lets you create stand-alone documents from images and their preview will be shown in your library. In the case you saw in the video above, you could easily add the next redesigned version to the same category to keep track of the progress.
Drag & drop take the iPad to a whole new level and allows lots of interactions in apps like GoodNotes that were unthinkable before.
GoodNotes 4 is available on the App Store for iOS. It is the best app to manage your paperless document workflow. It lets you save, manage, annotate, and organize all your documents so that they won‘t ever be lost again. Thanks to drag and drop, it is now easier than ever to manage and annotate all important documents in a single app.
Apple Distinguished Educator and 2-time Juno Award Nominee Shirantha Beddage on “Teaching with an iPad”
Two-time JUNO-nominee Shirantha Beddage is a baritone saxophonist, composer, and educator from Toronto, Canada. His newest album, Momentum, featuring drummer Will Kennedy of the Yellowjackets, was nominated for Jazz Album of the Year (Solo) at the 2017 JUNO awards. His compositions have earned him the Galaxie Rising Star Award at the Montreal Jazz Festival, placements on the Golden Globe-winning TV series "Fargo", and an honorable mention in the Canadian Songwriting Competition. He is currently the Head of Theory in the Bachelor of Music program at Humber College, where he teaches classroom courses, ensembles, and private lessons.
His engagement in teaching was honored by Apple that named him “Apple Distinguished Educator“.
Shirantha recently took the time to talk with us about some of his teaching workflows that heavily rely on GoodNotes.
Like a lot of other teachers, he was researching online for notebook apps, which led him to discover an article by Teddy Svoronos, who teaches Statistics at Harvard, that describes and illustrates some key features of GoodNotes that make the app particularly valuable for teachers. By integrating GoodNotes on his iPad in the classroom, Shirantha was able to replace PowerPoint and Keynote as his main teaching tools. Of course, we wanted to know why he was able to substitute two rich-featured presentation tools with a rather simple note-taking app for handwritten notes. He let us know that he found it allowed “a clearer, more vivid teaching experience for me and my students.“
“Don't let “Tech” get in the way of “Teach”
Since he relies on mainly two visual activities when teaching, which are “writing on a whiteboard“ and “analyzing printed sheet music“, he was able to simplify the technology integration by using an “all-in-one“ solution with a single app. Many teachers make the mistake to overwhelm their students when trying to use technology in the classroom. Building simple workflows is essential so that "Tech" does not get in the way of "Teach".
GoodNotes comes with a lot of built-in paper templates for every occasion, including some sheet music paper, so it is no surprise that many musicians like Shirantha himself pick GoodNotes as their go-to note-taking app. You can even import custom note-taking templates for other instruments like the Guitar for example.
Surely, providing great paper templates alone is not sufficient to guarantee an outstanding writing experience. There is one thing that needs to be on point: The handwriting needs to feel natural and should in no way be inferior compared to writing on real paper. Luckily, Shirantha made the right choice: “My handwriting looks very natural in the app, even when enlarged. This allows me to create a variety of detailed annotations on a slide, using the included pens, highlighters, and the shape tool.“
Shirantha: “This is an example a quick in-class activity. I use the colours, highlighters and the shape tool for more vivid in-class assessment in my Music Theory course”
If you‘re a teacher looking to make your classrooms interactive, Shirantha has a great tip for you: The TV-out mode. When you connect your device to an external screen via HDMI or AirPlay the presentation tools will show up and the app switches into TV-out mode. This means that the toolbar and all other UI elements, like pop-ups, are hidden on the screen for the audience but still show up on the iPad. “[...]the TV-out mode allows me to use Slide Over view privately, so that I can see my lesson plans in OmniOutliner, take attendance, play music, or navigate to a website in Safari during a lesson without distracting the students.“
Connecting your iPad to an external screen during the lesson also comes in handy when your students are working on in-class written exercises. Take a photo of a student‘s assignment and add it to GoodNotes and it will instantly show up on the screen allowing everyone to see it. Shirantha uses it to offer feedback and write annotations right on the photo which “comes in very handy on days when the students bring their original compositions to class, as it allows everyone to read the same sheet music while they’re performing or singing.“
Shirantha: “[...] the colours and highlighters help to draw the eyes to pertinent info on an otherwise busy slide.”
GoodNotes is the best app for teachers that want to integrate technology into their classroom without overwhelming their students. This way, digital technologies are leveraging the content facilitated during the lessons and are not the center of attention. It is available for iPad and iPhone on the App Store and at a discounted price through the Apple Volume Purchase Program for Educational Institutions.
How Drag & Drop will work with iOS 11 in GoodNotes
Apple has announced that iOS 11 will be released on September 19th. They have done it again: The way you use your devices will feel more seamless and intuitive than ever. Especially the iPad will finally be the productivity powerhouse that it was always meant to be.
Drag & Drop is probably one of the most anticipated iOS improvements of all time and we’re happy to announce that it will be supported in GoodNotes. Have a sneak peek at the wonderful things that will be possible:
1. Dragging & dropping multiple documents/notebooks to another category
2. Dragging documents back and forth between GoodNotes and other apps
3. Dragging handwritten notes to other apps AND convert them to typed text automatically
Truly magical, right? 🦄
Of course, a lot of other things will be possible with Drag & Drop in GoodNotes.
Check out Part 2 of how to use drag & drop with GoodNotes.
If you don’t have the app yet, you can download it right here.
7 Reasons Why the iPad is the Real Answer to your Meeting Notes Nightmares
The web is full of articles and debates on whether it is better to take your business meeting notes on a computer or write them in longhand. Certainly, taking proper meeting notes is an important skill in today‘s business world because there is nothing worse than participating in a 2-hour meeting and taking nothing out of it in the end. Researchers of Princeton University found out that people are able to remember information a lot better if they took notes on it longhand. “[…]processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning”, they wrote. If you type on a laptop, you tend to copy the words someone is saying instead of really trying to process them. But then there is the advantage that typed meeting minutes can easily be shared with co-workers that were not able to attend the meeting. Also, have you tried adding a screenshot of an important presentation slide to your notepad? Let’s face it - taking great useable meeting notes is a complex challenge. What if we told you that the iPad is the real solution to your meeting note nightmares because it combines the best of both worlds? We have identified 7 reasons for that.
1. You can still take your notes in longhand
Handwritten notes for meetings are in many ways superior to typing. As stated before, it is more efficient and helps you to capture and process what is being said rather than blindly copying it. So after the meeting, you did not waste valuable time but instead, you can dive right into work. Handwriting also enables you to draw arrows and lines freely, which is hardly possible on a laptop. The iPad‘s form and size resemble a lot with the appearance of traditional paper notebooks or notepads and at least since the introduction of the Apple Pencil in 2015, people have started using their tablets for note taking. Of course, you need a great note-taking app as well. Our app GoodNotes 4 is a simple but incredibly powerful notes app that allows you to take handwritten notes in digital notebooks and annotated imported documents. Thanks to our pioneering digital ink algorithm, writing feels just as fluent as on a piece of paper. It supports the Apple Pencil as well as lots of different other styluses.
GoodNotes is featured on Apple’s official website
2. Your meetings will be perfectly prepared and can easily be evaluated afterward
If you‘re about to attend a meeting, you should spend some time on preparing for it so that you can actively participate rather than wasting your time. Take some time before the meeting to gather the important reports, spreadsheets or charts. If you‘re using an iPad to save all your information digitally, you will have all documents right at your fingertips. Note apps like GoodNotes also allow you to add screenshots or images to your pages so that you can annotate them which can be a game changer in your meeting preparation. Finally, no more fiddling around with paper. When it comes to reviewing and evaluating your notes afterward, the iPad also has its benefits. You can use the device’s camera to quickly take a photo of an important slide and insert it into your GoodNotes notebook to annotate it later. Everything will be collected at a central place so that it can’t be lost. Also, you don‘t have to rewrite a whole page if you want to squeeze in some more details but instead just reorder and resize the content.
A post shared by GoodNotes (@goodnotesapp) on Sep 1, 2017 at 6:28am PDT
3. You can share your notes much faster
Again, since your notes are already on your iPad, you can easily share them via email without needing to retype or rewrite them. If your company is using a cloud storage like OneDrive for Business, you can upload your notes to a shared folder with a few quick taps so that everyone can access them. GoodNotes does not only support OneDrive but also GoogleDrive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and Box.
4. All your notes are searchable
Yes, you read it correctly. You won‘t have to dig through piles of paper to find that one important thing your boss said in the meeting last week anymore. Instead, you can just type in a keyword like “Meeting - September 5th“ and you can jump to the right page immediately. We‘re using a powerful OCR technology in GoodNotes so that even your handwritten notes are searchable. Bonus point: If you export the page as PDF to share it with your co-workers, the document will stay searchable.
5. You can open two different apps at the same time with split view
Split View and Slideover were some major additions to iOS. For the first time ever users were able to use two apps side by side on their iPad. While taking notes in a meeting you can easily slide over your mail app to open a relevant customer‘s email. In today‘s business world we still print out too many emails anyway.
6. The amount of (wasted) paper in your office will be reduced significantly
Printed out agendas for everyone, flip charts for brainstorming sessions, each participants notepad, email copies… A single business meeting requires a whole lot of paper that will either be thrown away because the information on it has to be digitized anyway, or easily gets lost if it is not organized correctly. If everything you can do on paper can be done better on an iPad, then what is the reason to waste so much paper? A paperless office is much more organized, allows everyone to access important information at any time - even on the go - and is better for the environment.
7. It is much more polite than typing on a laptop
Business etiquette matters. And isn‘t it much more polite to make eye contact with your collocutor by having a flat device laying in front of you than building up the physical barrier of your laptop screen?
Conclusion:
By combining the best of two worlds, the iPad has the potential of becoming the “weapon of choice” for everyone who wants to take great and usable notes in meetings. Information is easily accessible and note-taking is still as simple and convenient as writing with a pen on paper. You should try bringing your iPad to the next meeting.
About GoodNotes: GoodNotes 4 - Notes & PDF is a digital note-taking app that lets you take handwritten notes and annotate PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files. All your notes are searchable and can be organized neatly in the library. The option to import custom paper templates into the template library makes GoodNotes the #1 meeting note app for thousands of people worldwide. The app is available on the App Store for all iOS devices running iOS 8 or higher.
Novel writer Matt Gemmell about note-taking and paperless working on the iPad
People from all over the world already went paperless by doing all their handwritten note-taking and PDF annotating in GoodNotes. One of these people is Matt Gemmell from Scotland. We were curious to see how a famous novel writer like him uses our note-taking app in his workflow to write and publish novels such as “Changer“.
Having done all of his planning work on real paper previously, he discovered GoodNotes via a recommendation from someone on Twitter. Since then, all of his paperwork has been moved into GoodNotes. “I do broad planning of my novels in GoodNotes, focusing on the pace and rhythm of the overall plot, once I have an outline“, he told us. Besides digital notebooks for this purposes, he also uses the app for sketching and designs ideas for his website. Especially when working with designers, it is important to be able to quickly sketch your ideas and send them to your contractors, so that they can make a visual masterpiece out of it. Matt told us that he uses GoodNotes a lot to collaborate with his cover designers, for which GoodNotes is helpful because you can easily import documents or images from an email attachment, annotate them and send them back without ever needing to use a printer or a scanner. If you‘re also interested in reducing the number of printed pages in your work environment, we highly recommend having a look at this paperless productivity hack.
Creative work often requires the right inspiration at the right time. For that purpose, Matt has a scrapbook in his GoodNotes library where he collects screenshots for inspiration, which he can annotate with his thoughts and to review the ideas later when he needs them. Speaking of inspiration: Many people travel around the globe for the sole reason of getting inspired. While he is on a journey, Matt likes to write daily notes (which is more personal than typing) to his wife, who is at home in Scotland with their seven-month-old labradoodle puppy Whisky, which he shares with her by taking a screenshot with the lasso tool and exporting it to Messages.
Still, it takes a bit more than having a creative mind and being able to express yourself properly to be a successful writer. Matt also manages all the rest of his paperwork with GoodNotes like “filling in PDF contracts and signing them“, as he was letting us know in the interview.
When we asked him if there were any tips & tricks or workflows that he wanted to share, he pointed out that he likes the possibility to use custom paper templates and covers in GoodNotes and pointed to our template repository, where we upload lots of additional covers and templates, like his favorite “Moleskine-like“ cover, made by one of our long-term loyal users.
We were particularly happy to hear that he was one of the users that is aware of one of the so-called “hidden gems“ in GoodNotes which are features that you might not discover at first sight: The eraser has an additional option called “Erase Entire Stroke“, which allows you to “remove things like lines and highlighted areas with a single tap, without affecting any overlapping elements“, according to Matt.
Last but not least, we wanted to know what would be different if he had not discovered GoodNotes for digital note-taking. His answer was pretty straightforward: “I’d probably be using a lot more physical paper, and that comes with an environmental and storage cost.“
We can get a lot from this story, but most importantly we can see that even for a writer that is used to type a lot with the keyboard, handwriting and the ability to quickly visualize thoughts matters a lot.
There are many different ways of taking notes in school or at the university. Some prefer to take a structured approach and use an outline method to take notes, some may prefer a visual way and draw mind maps, some may even use no structure at all. However, there is one note-taking technique that is superior to others in many cases and science has proven that it is not only more efficient but also makes it a lot easier to review notes, for example when preparing for an exam.
The technique we‘re referring to is called "Cornell Note Taking". It is a system for taking, organizing and reviewing notes and has been devised by Prof. Walter Pauk of Cornell University in the 1950s.
How to use it
It requires very few preparation work which makes it ideal for note taking in class. The page will be divided into 4 - or sometimes only 3 - different sections: Two columns, one area at the bottom of the page, and one smaller area at the top of the page.
The idea behind this is very easy. All actual notes from the lecture go into the main note taking column. (Side note: We will cover general tips on better note taking in future articles. Make sure you don’t miss it by subscribing to our newsletter.)
The smaller column on the left side is for questions about the notes that can be answered when reviewing and keywords or comments that make the whole reviewing and exam preparation process easier.
When reviewing the notes, a brief summary of every page should be written into the section at the bottom.
Why should you use it?
Besides being a very efficient way of taking great notes in class, Cornell note taking is THE perfect tip for exam preparation. Why you might ask. The system itself encourages students to reflect on their notes by summarizing them briefly in their own words. Often, this can already be enough to remember study notes and to successfully pass an exam. When reviewing your notes it is useful to reorder objects on the page, for example, to add a solution to an answer on the side to the notes. Apps like GoodNotes help students to accomplish these tasks when notes are taken on an iPad.
We believe in the power of the system since it allows you to take, review and organize notes in a shorter time. Not only is it very efficient but it can also help you to achieve better grades in your exams. This is why we have included a Cornell note taking template into our free PDF template folder and encourage everyone to try it out in GoodNotes.
Instructions on how to import the template into the library in GoodNotes can also be found in the folder.
We hope that this tip for better note taking helps you to prepare yourself more efficiently for exams or the next meeting.
How to convert handwritten to-dos in GoodNotes to text and send them to Trello
Converting your handwriting to text in GoodNotes is awesome, right? But why and when is this OCR powered feature useful besides being able to search for your handwriting?
Here at GoodNotes, we love using our own app for taking notes during our weekly sprint meetings where we plan the development and set goals for the week. To organize our sprints, we use the to-do and task-manager Trello. Every week, we create a new list for tasks that should be completed during the sprint on our sprintboard.
There are a few reasons why we all use GoodNotes to taken handwritten meeting notes on our iPads: First, it is much more flexible than typing with the keyboard and second, it is more polite compared to hiding yourself behind a computer screen. So how can these two apps be combined?
How we convert our handwriting to text and send it to Trello
Everyone takes notes during the meeting into his meeting notebook in GoodNotes and when there is a clear to-do or task that should be completed during the next sprint, we can easily convert the handwriting to text and send it to our sprintboard in Trello with the export option without ever leaving GoodNotes. This guarantees a smooth note taking experience and you don't need to switch back and forth between apps. Check out the video below to see how.
Again, here is how you can convert your handwriting to text and send it to your to-do and task manager apps:
1. Write down a to-do or task in GoodNotes
2. Select the lasso tool and draw a circle around your handwriting
3. Tap inside the selection and tap "Convert"
4. Now tap on the export option in the upper right and select the app where you want to export the task to
Of course, this does not only work with Trello but also with other task managers like Todoist, Wunderlist or Sorted.
Now, go ahead and try sending to-dos from GoodNotes to your favorite to-do and task manager app. We hope you find this trick as useful as we do!
One essential trick for paperless working: Printing fewer emails
The road to the paperless office is challenging but we'd like to share some tips & tricks with you to master it with ease. We all know this from our daily work: You receive an email from a customer or your co-worker and you want to annotate it to highlight important parts or write to-dos next to certain sentences. So what do you usually do? Right, you hit Print and head over to your office's printer to collect your precious email print out. But who likes stacks of papers flying around the office that magically disappear whenever you need it to actually get some work done? Nobody, right?
What if we told you that there is a super easy productivity hack that lets you save an email as PDF to annotate it right on your iPad or iPhone? So stop printing emails and check out this short video:
Again, here are the steps to save an email as PDF on your iPad that runs iOS 10:
Hit the "Reply" button in your email and choose "Print"
On the preview pinch with your fingers, as if you would zoom in
Tap Export to send your created PDF to GoodNotes
Now you can annotate the email comfortably right on your iPad and don't have to worry about losing it again
Why is that way better than printing emails?
First, there are all the reasons why digital handwriting is awesome, second, the environment will thank you and third, you'll never need to worry about losing your sheets of paper again. They are neatly organized in your paperless GoodNotes library and both the content of the PDF and your handwritten notes will be searchable.
It does not only work with email
This way you can digitalise all your paperwork and things you used to print out before. The same productivity hack can be used with websites in your browser so you can save pretty much anything in GoodNotes. Perfect for the paperless office.
Want to get more helpful tips and tricks like that? Continue reading our blog or subscribe to our newsletter.
How to view your GoodNotes notebooks on a Windows device
“I don't own an Apple computer and therefore I can not use your mac app, but I still want to view the notes I'm taking on the iPad on my windows computer. Is there any way to do it?”
We actually hear this question a lot, so today we have decided to share a little secret with you: Even though you might be using a windows computer or tablet, you can still view all your notes from GoodNotes on it with one simple trick: Automatic backup.
How does automatic backup work?
Automatic Backup uploads all your notebooks to an external cloud storage like Dropbox, GoogleDrive, OneDrive, or Box. All changes will automatically update in the copies in your cloud storage. Should you lose your device or accidentally delete a notebook, you can easily reimport it from the backup.
So, what is the trick?
Originally, the feature has been implemented to keep your files safe so you never need to worry about losing them. However, it can easily be manipulated so that you're able to view all your GoodNotes notebooks on your windows computer. Here is how:
If you have not done it already, link a cloud storage to your GoodNotes app in Options>Settings>General
Navigate over to Options>Settings>Automatic Backup and activate it
Choose the cloud storage you have linked earlier
If you want to rename the destination folder where your notebooks should be located, tap on the default name next to the menu point “Destination Folder”
Here is the most important part: By default, the file format will be set to “GoodNotes Document”, which can only be opened with GoodNotes for iOS or GoodNotes for Mac. To access your notebooks from a windows computer, an android tablet or any other device, you will need to change the file format to PDF.
Tap “Done” in the upper right of the pop-up and you will see that your notebooks are already uploading to the cloud storage, by tapping on the “Auto-Backup” button in the lower left of your library view.
You're all set up. Now you can head over to your computer and always see the latest changes to your notes and documents in your cloud folder.
Limitation
There is one thing we want you to keep in mind when using this productivity hack. In case you ever need to re-import one of the notebooks from the backup, you won't be able to erase or select the handwriting on existing pages anymore since the document has been converted to PDF. Of course, you will still be able to add new pages to the notebook or make annotations on the existing pages.
The 3 apps you will need for researching as a student
If you don’t have enough time to read the whole article, scroll down to the end of the article where you can find a summary of the workflow. Enjoy!
This is a guest article from Gabriel, who is currently using a couple of apps to research for his master thesis.
Its been more than two years now since I proudly handed in my bachelor thesis at my old university. I remember it like it was yesterday: The feeling of accomplishment and relief after long weeks of research and struggle. Back then, I have been a huge fan of productivity apps already, but – wow – little did I know about workflows. My precious item for the bachelor thesis was a spiral bound collection of relevant articles, that I printed out and carried around the campus so that I always had them with me because I never knew when an inspiration would hit me. Good idea, you might say, but highly inefficient.
Right now I find myself in a similar situation: My master thesis is coming up and this time I want to do it right. Here are the three productivity apps that I use for my workflow to prepare and structure my topic, manage my literature and collect my thoughts:
1. Evernote
Evernote is my inbox for everything that could be of importance later on.
I actually started to use Evernote just recently, but already became a big fan, because I can simply store any thought or piece of information, no matter how tiny or unimportant it seems to be at first, inside my notebooks and will perfectly be able to find it afterward (with searching and tagging). Right now, I’m still busy trying to narrow down my focus on the topic, but I already have to think about how I want to design my questionnaire so that I can properly conduct the planned experiment. Thus, whenever I come across an important piece of information I can just save it to Evernote. The best input always comes from randomly talking to my fellow students about my topic. If someone says „Have you considered this and that?“, I will just pick out my phone and write down the thought so that I won’t forget it. So Evernote is my inbox for everything that could be of importance later on. I’m not really taking extra care of a neat structure because in most cases, time matters and I will review the notes anyway to see what I actually need for writing. This is what I put into my Evernote notebook:
An ongoing reading list with checkmarks
Screenshots from the AppStore (My thesis deals with mechanisms of it) with small annotations and descriptions
All sorts of typed notes, mostly ideas I want to remember
Quotes, links, and articles from web
I frequently review all the information inside Evernote to decide what needs a closer look.
2. GoodNotes
Of course, I use GoodNotes, because it has always been my go-to app for notetaking and collecting PDF files to annotate and study them. I have created a sub-category in my ”University“ folder that I called “Master Thesis“.
This folder contains lots of different PDF files, mostly scientific papers that I download from GoogleScholar or other research data banks. Sometimes you have to go old school and visit the library to get some literature. I usually turn to ScannerPro or use our Bookscanner to scan the relevant pages.
There are two more notebooks inside the category. Since I sort the notebooks by name I used the prefixes „1- & 2-“ so that they always stay on top. If you want to know more about this, check out my article on how to organize your notebooks in GoodNotes.
The first one is for my ongoing notetaking, like meetings with my supervising professor or documentation of structured interviews that I conduct. The second one contains a summary of the literature that I need to study for my thesis. If the papers are already in GoodNotes, the tab-function comes in very handy, because I can simply switch back and forth between the annotated and highlighted PDF file and my summary notebook. Should they be in Evernote, I make use of the multitasking function of my iPad Pro and have GoodNotes open on one side, and Evernote on the other side, to transfer the relevant information to my notebook.
Tips & Tricks: Saving articles from web to GoodNotes
GoodNotes currently has no own web clipper, so I needed to come up with a workaround, to save relevant articles from the web to GoodNotes as PDF. This is necessary when I already decided that the article will be relevant and I need to quote it during my writing. Otherwise, I simply send it to Evernote for further review. But how do I do it? Easy, I use the awesome Make PDF workflow with the workflow.is app.
This way I can easily highlight and annotate any web article in GoodNotes and even search for keywords in it 🤓.
So, GoodNotes contains all the really important documents:
Highlighted and annotated scientific papers
Book chapters, I need to study and quote
Input of my professor
Summary of all the literature
Questionnaire designs, etc.
3. Everclip
This app only is a small part of my workflow but not less relevant than the others, because it is pretty much the top of the funnel of my research progress. Usually, I open a bunch of tabs in Safari and then read through them one by one to see if they are relevant. Doing this in your browser is not really convenient because it quickly becomes confusing. That's why I open all the tabs instead and then use the share extension of Everclip to send all the content to Evernote. And thus, the circle begins again.
Summary
I hope I was able to give you an introduction to what you can do with the different apps that I mentioned and how you can use them to create pretty powerful workflows. Of course, this one does not only apply to writing a thesis, so I’m curious what other experiences you made. As promised, here is the summary of the workflow:
Usually, I browse the web or books and magazines for all sorts of content. If anything catches my attention, I use Everclip to quickly save it to Evernote.
If a thought comes to my mind, I use Evernote as an extension of my brain, so that I don’t need to worry about forgetting anything important. I just write it down, or take a screenshot and drop it into my notebook. Evernote is in the middle of the funnel and works like an inbox. I constantly review it and decide which things are relevant for the thesis.
Scientific papers, book chapters or articles that I need to study and highlight, are imported into GoodNotes. I can easily annotate them and summarise them in a blank notebook so that all important information is in one place when I want to start writing my thesis. Web articles or websites that I consider to be important right from the start can easily be saved as a PDF document and imported straight to my GoodNotes library with this workflow.
How to send your meeting minutes to Evernote using an intelligent workflow
We love creative workflows here at GoodNotes and there is one app that can really help you to automate them: https://workflow.is
Our user Jay is a true genius when it comes to creating those workflows. He uses it to send his meeting minutes, which he takes in GoodNotes, to Evernote via the export option. But not only does the workflow create a notebook in Evernote directly, it will also link it to an event from your calendar and if you need to follow up, you can add a simple reminder.
The perfect workflow for everyone who loves taking notes during a meeting on their iPad and then sending the information to Evernote directly.
Download the workflow
If you don’t need all those details in your notebook, you an also choose a simpler one, that only asks you for the title of your Evernote notebook.
Download the simple workflow
Did you know that your handwritten notes stay searchable, even after exporting them? One of the many reasons to take notes digitally.
