A term produces a surprising amount of paper.
Notes from lectures, a reading list for each course, PDFs you're meant to mark up by Thursday, photos of the whiteboard, and the idea you had on the bus and meant to write down.
Scratchpad wasn't designed for students in particular. But most of what a term needs turns out to be what it already does.
In the Lecture
Type fast and let the keyboard do the formatting.
Headings, checklists, tables, and callouts all come straight from the keyboard, and Markdown you paste arrives formatted.
One note a lecture, in a folder for each course, is plenty. Folders can hold sub-folders, so a course can have one for lectures and one for assignments.
Don't overbuild it. A filing system you have to maintain is one more assignment.
The Reading List
A checklist works well: one item per reading, ticked when it's done. Ticked items can drop to the bottom, so what's left stays at the top.
Paste a link on a line of its own and it becomes a card with the page's title and picture. So a list of articles is easy to scan rather than a column of addresses.
Marking Up a PDF
Drop a PDF into a note and its pages show in place. The expand button opens the reader, which has nine tools:
- For marking: a pen, a highlighter, underline, and strikethrough
- For writing: a text note and a post-it
- For the rest: shapes, an eraser, and a plain reading mode
They work with a mouse, a finger, or a stylus.
The one I'd point a student at first is Quote in note, because references are the dull part of an essay.
Select a sentence on a page, press it, and the words go into the note under the PDF, with a line like From Reading 4.pdf, page 12. Press that line weeks later and the PDF opens at that page with the words lit.
That's an essay's references, mostly done while you read.
Your marks are kept beside the PDF rather than written into it, and the reader's download button gives you a copy with them on the pages, for printing or handing in.
Voice Memos
The microphone in a note's header records straight into it, on your phone too.
Talk through the idea on the bus, or record a lecture you're allowed to record, and press the transcribe button on the player. The words come back as ordinary paragraphs you can edit and search.
A plan includes 20 hours of transcription a month.
Before the Exam
This is where it pays off.
One search box reads your notes, and also:
- Attachments: the text inside the PDFs, Word files, and slides you've attached
- Pictures: the printed words in pictures and scanned PDFs, in English and French, so the photo of a slide is searchable (handwriting isn't)
- Recordings: the transcripts of your recordings
So "Krebs cycle" finds the lecture note, the page of the textbook PDF, the slide you photographed, and the voice memo where you finally understood it.
A good term's notes are the ones you can find again in April.
More on that in Finding a note again.
The Student Discount
Students get 25% off either plan for as long as they're studying, up to five years.
| Usual price | Student price | |
|---|---|---|
| AI included, monthly | US$12 | US$9 |
| AI included, yearly | US$120 | US$90 |
| Your own AI key, monthly | US$8 | US$6 |
| Your own AI key, yearly | US$80 | US$60 |
Anyone aged 14 or over who's enrolled at a school, college, or university counts, anywhere in the world, high school included.
To apply, go to the students page and do one of two things:
- Give your school email address and click the link we send it.
- Upload a photo of your student card or a letter from your school.
We check it by hand, and once you're approved your plan moves to the student price by itself. There's no code to type.
Your proof is deleted as soon as we've reviewed it.
Once a year we'll email to ask for that year's proof, and that's all there is to it.
Found Again
Notes are only worth keeping if you can find them when it counts.
The rest is just paper.
