How To Take Notes For AWS Exams

g'day everybody patrick here and today i'm going to be talking about note-taking strategies for aws exams the reason i'm making this video is because i posted a video yesterday about the aws solutions architect professional exam and my strategies for that exam including preparation as well as exam strategies when taking the exam one thing i didn't mention though which i kind of wish i did mention was my note-taking strategy when i was preparing for the exam so that's what this video is about now this applies to all aws exams not just the aws solutions architect professional exam so first things first the question is should you be taking notes during the lectures that you're watching and and all the content that you're studying for these exams should you be taking really extensive notes or just brief ones etc so i'll tell you a bit about how i've handled this problem i don't take notes unless i think i'm going to forget something i have a few 200 page workbooks they cost about two dollars just go down to your local office suppliers shop and i have a few four color pens i really like the four color pens because then you can differentiate between for example i will write notes in a black pen or a blue pen and then i'll come back and i'll make little amendments in either green or red for example and you can also have black and blue interchange between them if you're doing like diagrams versus notes on those diagrams pointing arrows to things etc so i like having a four color pen that's quite helpful and then the 200 page books are good i think the only time i've actually run out of pages in one of those books was when i was taking the aws solutions prof solutions architect professional exam i wrote a lot of notes that was across all three of the courses that i followed um in most cases you won't use them all but they're basically free i know save the trees um but i like to take notes uh on a physical piece of paper uh rather than taking them digitally i think you remember it better that way um and my my rationale for taking notes is not so much that i'm going to return to those notes though often i do return to those notes it's more about the fact that it forces you to pay attention to the videos better when you're trying to distinguish what you should be noting versus what you shouldn't be noting and i definitely don't want to write everything down unless it's an extremely dense video that i had no idea about before um if it's something that i'm mostly familiar with then i'll play the video nice and fast and i will um i'll just pause it when i want to take notes on something that i wasn't quite as familiar with a little bit of a comment on playing videos quickly so i use a chrome extension called video speed controller it is an amazing extension you can use keyboard shortcuts to change the speed of any video and this isn't just youtube or just udemy or any of these video sites anywhere that there's a video embedded on a web page at all and you can modify the speed of the video to be any multiple of 0.1 so you can do 1.9 time speed you could do 0.7 time speed you could do 4.8 time speed if you really wanted to um there's actually no limit to it so you could do 0.1 or you could do 12 times speed if you if you really wanted the only real limit is your your internet speed um so i've found for me what a helpful range of speeds is is somewhere between about 1.4 times and 2.7 times depending on the speaker um if it's something i'm very familiar with and i'm not really too worried about and and i i know that i know most of the content already then i'll kind of skip through it a bit at maybe 2.3 times speed for most things where there's a lot of new content coming in i'll listen normally at 1.7 to 1.9 times speed and then i'll take pause to take notes on the video when i feel like i need to do that so that's my strategy for listening to these videos and then when i take these notes i focus on the things that i think are important to remember that i would not remember had i not taken those notes and that i would like to revisit at some point and i do revisit these as an example when i took the solutions i could take professional exam last weekend i revisited my notes the few hours before the exam i spent about three hours going over all of the notes that i had taken and just reading these notes and searching the documentation and other resources for for any advice that was um potentially helpful um from the notes that i'd taken where i may have had points of confusion or little asterisks that i've drawn saying i need to look into this a bit more so that's that's what the the notes uh the purpose that they serve for me it did take a couple of hours to go through that's how many i had taken but this was because it was a very in-depth course with lots of lots of lots and lots of interesting content sometimes the content will be a bit more sparse less less of a dense packed set of very thorough information maybe it's just talking in a broad overview of overview of a service and in that case you probably don't need to take as many notes on it some people do just fine just memorizing but personally i would say that taking notes is a good strategy you don't want to over complicate it though um i find that if you over complicate your note-taking strategy or anything else around the sort of the meta study um in terms of you know studying about how to study like how do you improve your your productivity and your your ability to retain information and so on it is a good thing to optimize to an extent but if you spend too much time doing this it can actually become a form of procrastination and some evidence for that i think is when you see people writing very nice headings very nice diagrams to describe all this information um and it takes them three times as long as if they had just done some chicken scratches um i try and make my notes legible by me and i don't really worry too much about whether someone else could necessarily read them um i wouldn't say they're messy but they're they're definitely not uh beautifully presented or anything like that um if you're if you're making content that you want somebody else to look at um like if you're teaching someone then by all means make your notes beautiful uh because you're trying to convey that information but for me this is just notes that i'm taking for myself uh therefore i see no reason to to spend too much time on them i'd rather spend extra time if i had extra time um focusing on learning more content going deeper with the existing content and so on so that's pretty much all i have to say about note-taking there is one other thing i'd like to bring up which is something i haven't used for the aws exam so much but i have used in the past when i was learning french it is somewhat targeted towards language learning but you can really use it for anything um and that is using electronic flash cards now you might say what's wrong with uh paper flash cards and i'll tell you there's a big problem with paper flash cards you don't know when you want to see them um because unless you have a very intricate system for i've seen this flash card before i'm good with this one i'm going to put this in this pile i've got to put this one in this pile it's too much to maintain it's better to have a system that manages this for you and that system i know it sounds like i'm about to plug a sponsor here but trust me i do not have sponsors you've seen the number of subscribers i've got on this channel um that system is called anki so anki is a brilliant flash card program its user interface is probably the number one thing holding it back from being extremely well known um because it is i find it fine to use but i have tried to introduce it to other people who aren't necessarily um sort of in the it industry or who aren't so good with like more difficult to use programs and they they find that they would rather use something that's easy to use but less powerful um but you guys are doing aws and aws is pretty much the same position right so aws is not necessarily the nicest console in the world but it can get things done it's like lego so same thing with anki it's a very very powerful flash card program um and it's designed for space repetition so what that means is it will show you a flash card um if you then you tell it you try and memorize you try and remember what was on the other side of the flash card and then you tell it how well you went recalling it and so if you went badly over calling it it'll show you that flash card again very soon and if you went better then it will continue space this out so it might go one day before it shows you and then i'll go another three days and then seven days and then a month and then so on um and the idea is that eventually you're gonna commit this to long-term memory and you're never gonna forget it so that's what i did with a lot of the vocabulary for for french and that has uh served me well so i would suggest the same thing for aws is maybe something you might want to look into i would provide a word of caution there which is that you probably don't want to memorize stats and figures so much um number one they're liable to change and number two they're not really so important either for the exam or in real life um for example if you're trying to memorize the maximum size of a object in an s3 bucket is five terabytes i can't really see how that would help that much what's probably good to know is that it's in the terabyte range and it's not 500 terabytes and it's not five gigabytes but uh you don't need to know the exact figure basically um actually i do think the that's a funny example because this lotions architect associate exam i think one of the questions may be exactly what is what is that so i may be contradicting myself there but in general you don't want to memorize numbers um you want to memorize um the the important factors that that sort of all come into play as you practice with this so so flashcards can be a way to commit that to memory but it's only a part of the solution it's not everything so one thing that i might suggest might be a good thing to make as a flash card is the five pillars of the well architected framework for example uh a bit more at the associate level ubr something like that maybe the six hours of cloud migration that kind of thing um and then maybe definitions for each of them etc so there's there's plenty of potential to use this um it's just an idea i've had i haven't used it personally but i'll probably be looking to it for the next exams that i do and that's pretty much all i want to say about note-taking if anyone has any note-taking strategies please feel free to leave them in the comments i'd like to see i'm always open to trying new things and thank you for watching everybody please remember to give this video a like if you liked the video subscribe to the channel if you want to see more content like this and have a great day guys catch you guys later

Channel: Patrick Brett

Views: 3,140

Keywords: aws, amazon web services, exam strategies, note taking, exam preparation, solutions architect

Id: KufMLvF6IHU

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020