Notability Tutorial - Taking Paperless Class Notes on an iPad

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’m going to give you a quick tutorial on my favorite handwriting app — Notability — and show you how I take notes in class and from textbooks using the Notability app on the iPad. 

There are many people who open up their laptops during class and type out their notes.  There are some nice things about this. You can store your notes with all of your other class documents and they are searchable.  The problem for me is that I don’t retain information quite as well when I type it. The kinesthetic act of writing actually helps me to commit information to memory.  Add to that the ability with handwritten notes to color code, pull in photos, draw sketches, and create relationships and it is hands down better for me than typewritten notes. 

I’ve tried a bunch of different note apps.  Notability continues to be my favorite for a couple of reasons. For one thing — it allows me to pull photos into my note and draw on top of them.  For whatever reason, that is crucial to me. Here’s one way I might use this. I need to give my mom directions to my son’s tennis practice. I’ll screenshot the map and then mark it up to show home, the route, and some important landmarks that might help her. Sure, I could just do all of this on Google Maps and then make some text notes underneath, but this is much more intuitive for her. I also use this feature to take a picture of my son’s math homework and write on top of it when I am helping him with his Algebra.  Plus, I can take pictures of PowerPoint slides during class and then draw on and engage with that material in real time. 

The other thing that I like about Notability is that you have lots of options for backing up your notes and sharing with other devices. Some note taking apps are like a little lonely island, but Notability does a pretty good job allowing you to see your notes in other places than just your iPad. I have my notes backed up to Google Drive, where it saves them as PDFs and I have iCloud turned on so that I can see and manipulate those same notes on my phone with the Notability App for iPhone.   For example, here is a note that I created on my iPad, and here it is — courtesy of iCloud — on my iPhone. There are also lots of ways to export notes, but I'll talk about that a little later on.

Okay — those are just some of the things that differentiate Notability from the other apps I’ve tried. But crucially, it also does the basics of note-taking and drawing really well.  Let me show you. 

• Organization - Notability has 2 levels of organization.  It refers to them as dividers (that is the top level) and subjects (the second level). I have a bunch of dividers including one for Home, Grad School, Work, and Writing. Then under those dividers, you can add categories or subjects.  I have really straightforward categories under Grad School -- one subject for each class.  But under Home, I have subjects for Forms, Packing Lists, and a Random category. You can split this up however you need your notes organized. Notability has not yet adopted virtual organization or tagging — they are still operating with physical organization.  Because I don’t keep a ton of notes in Notability, that is fine by me. Let’s start a note in one of my Grad School classes, so I can show you how I take Class notes. 
• Title - Okay, go ahead and title this whatever you want. Notability date stamps each note, so you don’t have to include the date in the title unless you need that redundancy.   Or you need the date in the title when you export the note later on.
• Sort - Notability gives you 3 different was to sort your notes: by name, by the date you created the note, and by the name that you last modified the note. I normally use last modified. 
• Page - by default, I like the white paper with no lines.  But when I’m taking classroom notes, I prefer writing on lined paper otherwise I tend to write on a slant.  To change it, you tap on this wrench in the upper right hand corner and choose Paper.  There are 4 different width choices for lined paper, several for graphing paper and a bunch of other colored paper options. You can see what the paper looks like with your note before even leaving this area. I usually use this lined option. 

Writing Tools:

• if you choose the text tool, Notability allows you to enter text using a text box or just by typing anywhere on the note. 
• You can use a colored pen with two screens of colors (no ability to create your own colors, but I’ve never minded that) and the ability to change the thickness of the pen from super skinny to fat. You can zoom in to do more precise work, or use the handwriting panel to write longhand and easily advance to the next segment of the paper — typewriter style). 
• You can choose to use the highlighter tool with the same series of colors and thicknesses, this time only transparent. 
• This is one of my favorite tools.  The scissors allows you to cut and paste handwritten elements. For example, I want to move this.  I cut this using the scissors tool and paste it over here. You can also do this between notes, but it will just copy it as an image.  Here’s another thing that I learned recently, that I love. You can use the scissor tool to change the color of the pen or highlighter of already written notes.  Select the portion of handwriting that you want to change, then hit Style and change color or pen width. I love this since it helps me to be consistent when color coding my notes without having to rewrite things. 
• This tool that is shaped like a finger allows you to move the screen up and down. I have an Apple Pencil that is Bluetooth connected, but if you do your writing with a non-Bluetooth stylus or your finger, you either need to use multiple fingers in order to scroll up or down or use this tool.  Okay -- those were the writing tools -- Notability also gives you the ability to

Insert things into your note: 

• Like a photo that you have saved or a new photo.  We talked about this already — it great that you can draw right on top of photos.  Particularly during class presentations. 
• You can insert a GIF or webclip. 
• You can record audio from the class and it remembers what you were writing so that you can replay it later.  Watch this. Cool, right?  I have used this for interviews where I can’t write fast enough to catch quotes verbatim, but I haven't used this in the classroom. That said, I can see why you would if you were a big audio learner. 
• You can create a diagram here with this figure tool. If you choose figure, you can create shapes and lines connecting them.  And even label them. This inserts like a diagram into your note. You can’t manipulate the elements without opening the figure, but you can draw on top of it.
• And finally, you can add sticky notes.  I like this tool. Go ahead and add a sticky note.  You can either choose the type here, or change the paper once it has been inserted.  Then when you write on this note, the writing always remains with the note.  I like the way stickies make ideas or reminders pop out — just like with real life sticky notes. 

It is easy and intuitive to rearrange note order and delete and add pages with this panel.  You can also tag pages with bookmarks and then show all of the bookmarked pages here. This is particularly good for long PDFs that you import. Although I personally prefer the GoodReader app for this. 

And finally, there are lots of ways to export your notes. Let me just walk through emailing your note.  You hit the share button up here and then email. For format, you can choose PDF, which is like a print out of your notes, RTF which just keeps text and recording, or the native format, which you can only be opened in another Notability app. I almost always choose PDF. Then you can select pages to export and choose which things you want to appear in your exported file — the paper, the recordings, the page margins.  Hit View to see a preview of your export. You can also print here plus send your file to a bunch of different services if you are connected to them in the settings. In addition, if you hit Other Apps, and share note, you get a ton of other options including Save to File which I use to attach notes to ongoing email conversations. Suffice it to say, there are lots of ways to export your notes to lots of different places. Which is actually good, since I don’t tend to store my notes in Notability unless I’m actively using them.  Once I’m finished making changes, I export them to Google Drive for safekeeping.  For example, once the new semester started, I exported all of the notes from my classes from last semester to Google Drive for storage and deleted them out of Notability to start fresh.  

Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!