How to take notes in class

Well schools on soon and tbh I’m kinda looking forward to it. Not so much the early mornings and having to squeeze through crowds of people (people at school can be kinda gross :s) but just the fact that I’ll have more things to do and more things to organise and plan oh and of course the opportunity to see all my friends everyday 🙂 so back to topic in this blog I will tell you on how I take notes in class and what I think are some really great ways for taking notes.

The cornell method

I think this by far is the most useful one. Not so much the most popular amongst teens since we tend to be pretty lazy but this note taking method is extremely productive and useful.


The diagram is pretty straightforward about how this system works but if you write all your class notes on paper then I suggest this is how to do it.

The outline method

I think this method is much more suited for students who write their notes on a computer or tablet. It simply requires you to write your main points in a larger font then bullet point other information within those points in more detail. You could of course still use this with paper but on a computer or tablet you can easily add more bullet points (like a whole lot of bullet points) but on paper you tend to run out of space as you cannot predict exactly how much space you’ll need per topic.

Outline poster

Mind Map Method

I generally don’t use this for studying or taking notes are anything really. I more so use this method for like planning what I’m going to write for an essay or just keeping organised. This would be more like a content page for your notes I reckon. I don’t even know haha but this method requires you to write the main topic in one giant bubble in the middle of your page, then several mini connecting bubbles coming off it that are subtopics to the main idea. Coggle is a great app to let you use this kind of method.


So that’s all I have for now. I generally use the outline method with like a bit of a mix with the cornell method but I use an iPad to take notes so it’s mostly just the outline method but instead of using bullet points I generally just tab them. Not really a difference but it just looks less like a test and more like notes to me. Oh I do have one more important tip and that is to COLOURCODE. Yes colour coding is exxtreeemmmmeeelllyyyy important (on computer and paper) it just make your notes a bit easier to read instead of it looking like one big 1000 chaptered book of jibber jabber.