A System for Reading: how I read purposefully and remember what I read

hi my name's aj smith i'm a primary school teacher in london and i'm here today to talk to you about reading i love physical books i've always loved physical books i love getting them as presents i love buying them i used to work in book shops i have shelf upon shelf physical books but recently i've moved from being a real physical pen and paper guy to being an almost entirely digital reader that means that i've gone from reading physical books to reading ebooks i've gone from printing out articles that i want to read on the train to reading them on my ipad or on my kindle i've gone from taking notes in dozens of notebooks scraps of paper post-it notes record cards uh the backs of envelopes to um actually having all my notes in one place easily accessible and i'm going to talk to you a little bit about the kind of process that i go through when i'm reading for work i'm reading professionally i'm going to talk to you about a couple of apps that i use to make that whole system that whole reading echo system work and i'm also going to talk to you about my knowledge base in notion which is something i'm just getting started with now but i can already see improvements in my professional life and just in reducing the amount of stress i have around professional development around reading so the first thing to talk about is the way that this reading system works if you like i don't really like thinking of it as a system but there is a certain workflow to it so firstly you know physical books are great i love physical books but i've moved mostly to reading ebooks on my kindle um that means that i can have everything in one place so whether it's books journal articles blog articles it can all be physically in one place which is in my kindle or on some of the apps that i use on my ipad or on my computer okay so the first bit of technology i want to talk to you about is this it's called instapaper you've probably heard of it before or you might have used pocket which is very similar to it um instapaper basically takes articles that you want to read blog posts anything like that it converts it into really simple text format and then what i really like is that it automatically transfers it over to my kindle so that i can read it so i'll show you how this works you basically you make an account and install a chrome widget whatever they're called in a plug-in uh then say i'm browsing on twitter and i see a blog that i want to read so i click on that and i think well i want to read this at some point okay probably so i go and it saves that and here's another blog and it's really quick it takes just the text and the images none of the guff that's on a lot of these uh news article websites and i can save these all now um and here's an article so what it'll do is it'll just take the center of this article it won't take any of the text around the outside and then i go over to my insta paper and i can see here this is my reading list now this is what i want to read and i can see articles that i've read here in the past as well and what it does is it sends a little digest of these to my kindle so let's take a look at that so here's what that looks like on my kindle this digest that it sends through is fantastic firstly what i really like is instead of physically putting the articles on here it sends you this as one document but with each of the articles is a different section of that document so i can see here some blog posts that i wanted to read in the news article and this is um neil armand's fantastic blog about how he teaches maths lessons so i can go here and i can read it transfers the pictures not always perfectly but usually you know considering this is on a kindle uh in a in a way that's good enough to see and if they don't transfer onto here i just open up instant paper on my computer or on my ipad and i can see it there i'll read the articles um and then i can also highlight what's going on here and this is going to be really crucial to the next step that we're going to look at because the app that we look at there takes all of this from the kindle or takes it from highlighting and notes in instapaper itself and puts it all in one place then i also use the kindle as well and it's a kindle oasis it's a real you know again i've always liked reading actual books but you can't carry six or seven books around at a time um it's not great to keep printing out articles that you want to read um i don't particularly like reading on my phone so i invested in a really nice kindle the kindle oasis it has this incredible warm light which makes it perfect for reading when it is dark and when it's december obviously it's dark quite a lot so i read on the train in the morning i get the 550 train and i can read on my kindle because it's nice and uh bright but also nice and warm read in bed read on the train on the way home and so books here they look great they're nicely formatted i can choose the font size and things like that but again it's this ability to highlight and this is going to come in really important in the next couple of steps in terms of both note taking and in terms of keeping track of what you're reading i also like the fact that you can search for terms here um inside your books you can also see individual chapters and things like that and the kindle's come a long way so if you haven't used the kindle for a while it might be worth getting hold of one and seeing if it is a good way for you to do some digital reading okay so here's my ipad and i'm just going to quickly show you how i do note taking on my ipad there's kind of two types of reading that i might do so this is the insta paper app um if i was reading something that was a bit more of a news article or a blog article i would tend to just read it and then i would highlight sections of it that i thought were important i'll show you what happens to those highlights in a minute um if i was going to make notes on this it might just be a couple of bullet points in a notebook that i'm using uh it's unlikely that i make really lengthy notes on a on a blog article or a news article or anything like that instead if i'm reading something more substantial so if i'm reading a book and it's something that's important for work that's when i do more in-depth note taking so for this i use good notes and i absolutely love good notes and i'll make a good notes video at some point um it's a brilliant note-taking app that is the closest thing i can get as someone who really appreciates pen and paper to the experience of note-taking well with pen and paper gives you the option of doing cornell notes which i've always really enjoyed combined with the apple pencil with a matte screen protector it really does feel pretty close to the experience of writing in a notebook and there's actually benefits you know like being able to erase what you're writing having what you're writing becomes searchable shareable putting it into a pdf all of that makes this a better approach than having what half a dozen notebooks on the go at any one point with your scribble notes in them that aren't indexed so here this is my work cpd my professional development notebook and you can see this is one of the books i'm reading at the moment and what i might do is i might have my kindle out and i might sit at a desk and i might use the kindle um because i really like the screen on this for reading and make notes on the ipad but because the ipad has such a brilliant huge screen which i absolutely love um i can actually get the kindle app up on the right hand side or if it's not something that i've bought on amazon it could just be a pdf on the right-hand side it could just be a different app that allows me to read e-pubs and here you can see i can read almost as if that's the same sort of width as my phone and because i use a5 paper which is a bit smaller than average on my goodness notes it means that i'm able to actually take full size notes on the left hand side whilst reading on the right hand side without the need to magnify so that's really handy for if i'm taking the train to work or if i am not i would be at the moment but maybe sat in a cafe or something like that and i wanted to use this as a note-taking device the next step of course is what happens to all these notes and highlights how do i keep them all in one place and make sure that i'm actually gonna do things based on what i'm reading and what i'm writing here and that's what i'm gonna show you now so the first thing i do with my notes well maybe it's the last thing i do with my notes but it kind of proves that i'm not quite over pen and paper yet is good notes is great you just export your notes as a pdf and then you can literally print them out hole punch them and keep them all in one place so you have a physical copy of those notes at the same time as having a digital copy maybe this is nostalgia on my part i don't know but i really like having that physical copy okay so the next part i want to show you is my knowledge base which is kind of a work in progress on notion and show you the way that i take the notes and the highlights that i've made and put them into a place that's easily accessible and easily searchable then i'm going to talk to you about actually implementing these things in my professional life so here it is stunning isn't it i mean it's currently two pages but it's a work in progress and it's something i'm gonna focus on over the next couple of weeks this is one of the first pages i made in notion and it was just a notes library for my professional development reading so for example i saw this talk by christine council about history planning i made a note of where it was and i can insert the url here to find it again if i need to and these are the notes that i've exported from good notes and for me a huge game changer in terms of moving from a physical notebook like this that's full of page off the page of you know admittedly nice notes but they're not searchable they're not indexed they're not i'm not necessarily going to remember everything that's in here these are my notes from that good notes allows me to type in questions even with my janky handwriting and find it say i wanted to find where i'd written about depth in these pages of notes now in three pages of notes that's quite handy but when i'm reading a book and i'm writing 20 pages of notes game changer furthermore good notes will allow you to search through all of your notes so if i want to find references to say curriculum in all my notes i go into the good notes app and i can search for it and i will come up and you know my handwriting is not the worst but it's not the best the handwriting recognition is great and i can even copy text from here and paste it into other documents paste it into a note-taking app paste it into notion if i needed to so that's the brilliance of good notes for me is making your notes searchable okay so the next thing for me is read-wise and i absolutely love read-wise it's an app that automates a process that would otherwise be really time consuming and probably not something that i would get around to doing very often and that's taking quotes and highlights from kindle but also from other apps and services as well or quotes and highlights that you manually input yourself and keeping them all in one place and it has an export to notion function which is fantastic for a notion nerd like me so this is what read wise looks like you connect it to various different services to import so for example here i've got it connected to kindle and instapaper twitter and the podcasting app air that i use so it imports all of the highlights from there and it syncs daily or i can do manually sync as well and then it gives you a daily review and i love this as a teacher because it's actually an example of space retrieval which is the idea that you know our short-term memory and our long-term memory they're not the most efficient things in the world and we forget what we read um if we don't review this after time you know the forgetting curve so here it shows me a daily review of five or so quotes that i've looked at that i've highlighted in books and it could be from last week or it could be from a year ago that's how long you've been using this it gives me the chance to favorite these to tag them i can get rid of them if it's not a quote that i think is particularly useful i read it and i keep it next it takes it into notion for me so here is the book that i've been reading uh the research ed guide to leadership i like that it brings in the image of the cover from kindle it tells me where i can find it url everything's imported there but this it brings in all the quotes that you make and it syncs it daily and i absolutely love that i think it's fantastic so i can see at a glance these quotes and when i'm writing a blog i will literally just take these and i'll paste them into the blog article that i'm reading and writing as inspirational to users direct quotes and it's fantastic i mean it really does change what you're doing with your reading so that's the basis of my kind of knowledge base of my note taking now is having those pdf notes from good notes that are searchable and having all of these quotes and things here uh in one place and then the last step and this for me is the real important step and that's implementation and i heard fantastic talk the other day david weston was talking at the national insect day about how to actually make professional development worthwhile because if we're not implementing what we learn if we're not changing our professional lives by the reading that we do then it's just reading for pleasure and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that but we can't claim it to be some great professional development so when i'm reading now i want to hear a talk i go in and i make an implementation page on the notion notes so here i've imported my pdf notes and then when i've had the time i've gone back through and i've made a note of everything that i want to implement in my professional life and again i've done it here with this other talk that i heard the other day this is about modeling and practice something really practical i can use in the classroom and what i can do is i can even convert these using notion into a to-do list into tick boxes and i can say yeah i've tried that i've tried this then i can click on it and i can say turn into a sub page and i can make further notes on it like that and that's the real benefit of notion it's so powerful to be using it as a knowledge base now obviously you don't have to use notion for this you could use any of the other productivity apps that are out there like trello you could even do this in a physical form with notebooks and whatnot i've gone from having dozens of notebooks on the go at the same time from really struggling to keep track of what i've read and what's important and what the takeaways are to having a really systematic approach to reading this is something i want to develop over the next few weeks and months so hopefully i'll come back to it again in another video i'd love to know if you have any questions about this or if you're curious about anything any specific part of it i can go into more detail about i really hope you've enjoyed today's video and that you found it useful please do like and subscribe this is a new channel a new venture for me so it's really important in the first early stages of this to get that engagement on the video so i'd really appreciate that do check out my other video which is about using notion as a teacher planner if you're interested in productivity and things like that and it's been really great to speak to you today and i'll speak to you again very soon bye

Channel: AJ Smith

Views: 1,614

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: productivity, notion, Notion, evernote, notetaking, teacher, planning, studyblr, study blog, Todoist, apps, ipad, reading, instapaper, readwise, goodnotes, kindle

Id: -T57bBtEymo

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020