My Favourite Note-Taking App For Students! (RemNote)

hey everyone in this video we're going to be talking about studying note-taking and how i specifically do that using rem note by the way if you're new here my name is jorzen i'm a third-year medical student i've been using remnant to study for about one year now and in my opinion it's one of the best apps out there for students it integrates active recalling space repetition into note-taking in a very seamless way today i'm going to take you through my remnant knowledge base to show you how exactly i take notes from lectures and how i study with those notes to make my studying more efficient i'm going to split this video up into three parts first we're going to talk about organizing and how i keep my notes in a very systematic format next we're going to be talking about how i take notes from lectures and how i understand things to make things more efficient and finally we're going to be talking about how i implement active recalling space repetition and study those notes and memorize everything i'll be leaving timestamps in the description and you can use the little youtube chapters function so you can skip around the video if you'd like so you don't have to waste a lot of time with that said let's get into my workflow okay so let's start off with organization organizing my notes in remnant mostly happens within the sidebar so if you've used remnant before you know that the sidebar has three parts it has the pinned section the draft section and the finished section i have changed the pin section to become subjects rather than pinned because that just works better with my workflow now the way you do this is by actually searching up something known as the document sidebar and uh once you go in there you can uh just so for example this used to be pinned and then you just double click this so it opens up the page and you can just change the name so this used to be pin i made subjects because that's where i actually put in all the subjects that i have to learn so for example we can see the pharmacology cardiology pathology ent which is ear nose and throat and also surgery so when i have to study something or if i'm in class taking notes what i would do is i would always make a new document for that specific note and once i do that by going here hovering over the little plus and making a new document it pops up into the draft section so for right now it's untitled let's just call it new note for example and what happens is since it's in the draft section it gives me an overview of what i'm studying right now so for example we can see quite a bit here and this is pretty useful for me because studying usually takes more than one study session for me so coming back to ram note and seeing what i have to do is sort of a good organization trick that i have come up with now when i am done taking my notes when i'm done making my flashcards or whatever i can easily check this box right here and move to the finished section which sort of acts like an archive now i like my notes organized subject-wise so how i do this is every time i have the new note i can use the tag feature and for example if this is pharmacology we can tag it as pharmacology and if i open up pharmacology on the side here by shift-clicking it's going to populate within here as a tagged rep now this is pretty great about rev note the organization using the tag system is pretty quick it's pretty efficient and i really like using that to organize everything subject-wise and since i have my subjects pinned in the sidebar i always have quick access to them now that we have our organization down let's talk about how i take notes from my lectures into rem node now one feature that i love about rem node and why i would consider it to be my favorite note taking app out of all of them is the fact that remnant allows you to make flashcards out of your notes without doing anything else and this is pretty great because you don't have to waste time making your notes in one application and making your flashcards in another everything is pretty seamless everything is pretty quick and i really like that because it saves quite a bit of time so due to this flashcard structure of rem node your notes are made to emphasize active recall in space repetition so what is actually free call what is space repetition they're basically the pillars of effective studying i've made a video about active recall space repetition which you can watch up here but in a nutshell active recall is when you test yourself on the topic before rereading it active recall is pretty great because the typical way of revision at least for me was that i would take my lecture i would summarize everything in the lecture into my own words and then i would keep re-reading those notes until the exam came by hoping some sort of osmosis happened from the notes to my brain but that's pretty inefficient and science has proven that there are more efficient ways of studying and one of them is active recall like i mentioned so the first step that i take when taking notes from my lectures is i would skim through my entire lecture and write out every subheading as a bullet point so for example right here in this lecture about mood stabilizers anxiolytics and sedatives i have written out the main subheadings i was studying this before i shot this video so that's why i have this in this way having a skeletal structure of your lecture helps you in figuring out what the important points are more often than i would like to admit i have taken too much time with certain topics just because i thought it was important but in the end it was not so this like in the words of ollie abdul helps you not lose the tree from the forest anyway let's go back to the antipsychotics notes so once i've skimmed through the lecture the next step that i do is i would read each part and while reading i would ask myself do i understand this this is akin to something known as the fineman technique which is basically when you would ask yourself at each interval can i explain this to a five-year-old now the whole point of the finding technique is to know if you actually understood the topic that you are learning and it i feel like it's pretty important to differentiate between road memorization and understanding this is mainly because road memorization works in the short term but in the long term you really want to understand things while learning so you can fit it into the bigger picture and you can use it with different insights and you can use it in different places like for example in medicine so if i do have some gaps in my knowledge while asking myself do i really understand this i would use google and then i would try to figure out stuff and if sometimes google sometimes i would use even a textbook and i would make sure that i actually do understand things before i make notes on that once i have figured out that i have understood something what i would do is i would then hide the lecture or i would just put it onto the other screen and i would try to write the notes out in my own words now this is basically actually recall in action i am not looking at what i just learned what i just read and i'm just writing it down in my own words but when i'm writing it down i would nest it under a question so i can revise it in the future using actual recall so for example right here we have this question when is a person said to be in a psychotic state that's usually when they present with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder i have written this out in the syntax that remnant uses to make a flashcard and this is automatically going to the flashcard queue so i can revise it using the specialization algorithm which i will get to in a little bit now remnant has multiple types of flash cards which are pretty useful so for example right here i was talking about the dopaminergic pathways which are some pathways in your brain that are pretty important with psychosis and what i can do with this picture right here that i've put in is i can actually make image occlusion cards now if you're familiar with enki you know what image occlusion cards are so basically i can just draw a little box around these labels right here and these are going to be flash cards in themselves so the flash card right here is probably going to cover the a part the music cortical part and i'm going to look at the picture look at the blue one and figure out which pathway that is and that is pretty helpful so like i said earlier the cool thing about remnant is that you can make elaborate notes like i have here and you can make flash cards at the same time and that is just saving a ton of time and i find that pretty useful now if you're not a flashcard person like me at times what you can do is you can use rem node's toggle function so a toggle is basically something that is nested under the node so for example right here we have positive symptoms so examples of positive symptoms i can just click this little button here and it gets hidden underneath the question and this is pretty useful too this is this can also be active recall so for example when i'm realizing my notes i can go through it and it's asking me what are the examples of positive symptoms so if i remember right they can be delusions and helium hallucinations and i can just click it see if i'm right and that's just great now this is how i take notes from a lecture what about taking notes during class now the way i do this is also in remnant i would make a new document and for example we have the reno pathologies notes right here so like i said earlier you can you can quickly use keyboard shortcuts to make headings and subheadings and verb notice pretty quick for taking notes in general because it's all bullet points and everything is organized pretty automatically and while the lecture is going on i can easily take screenshots drag them into round note everything fits in pretty well and later on i can go through these notes and then i can make flashcards out of everything right here i don't have to do everything all over again like i said it saves a lot of time now if you're studying your lectures you can open it side by side with render but remote also has a pdf editor but sadly this is a remnant pro feature which you have to pay six dollars a month for but if you want to try out remnant pro for free you can go down to the description i will have an affiliate link down there with which you can get one free month of remnant pro i will also get a kickback from this link just letting you know so it's uh it's happy vibes all around now another cool feature that i use pretty often in remnant is ram references which is basically bi-directional linking so for example if we go into the cardiomyopathies lecture here i was talking about hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and one of the things that happens in this is the left atrium gets enlarged and this can lead to something known as atrial fibrillation or afib for short so i have this little thing here that looks like a hyperlink but this is a reference and if i shift click this we can see that it jumps to the notes about atrial fibrillation now these are notes from my knowledge base from another lecture known as arrhythmias so for example in the future if i was looking into these notes on cardiomyopathies and i didn't know what afib was for example uh i could easily click it and look at what afib is because i have pretty detailed notes on it another thing this helps with is that in the eight fib note i can see that it has been referenced here so in the future when i have a lot of things referencing back to afib i can have a bird's-eye view of atrial fibrillation and things that cause it that's pretty much how i take notes from my lectures and from classes into rem node now what about studying what about revision let's talk about memorization memorization is extremely easy in revenue this is mainly because one you're making flash cards while making your notes and second is because it has a space repetition algorithm built in so you have this thing called the master cube which is all your flash cards from all your notes so if i click it right here we have 28 flash cards i have to go through for the rest of the day now i mentioned that remnant has a built-in space repetition algorithm what does this mean face repetition is related to something known as the forgetting curve which says that over time you tend to forget things and you can combat this forgetting curve by revising at certain intervals and that's basically spacing out your repetition hence the namespace repetition so previously i used to sort of calculate how long i have to wait before i study something again before i revise it again and i used to do this by figuring out how well i did the last time and then figuring out a date after that but with remnant i really don't need to do that because the algorithm does that for me so every time you get a flashcard so for example right here i'm gonna click the answer you get these little reactions here and if you use anki you'd know what these are so with these reactions you can tell it if you got the flash card pretty correct if you got it pretty wrong or somewhere in between and depending on your reaction the algorithm is going to figure out when to show you the card again to combat that forgetting curve and that i think that's pretty cool now there's a couple of reasons why i prefer remnant's flashcard system over something like anki or quizlet the first one is the hide function of the flashcard and this is basically a way to make life a little bit easier you know those moments when you're studying your flashcards and you accidentally hit your keyboard and it shows you the answer with rem note if you hit h here it's gonna put it back into the deck of flashcards without putting it into the algorithm and it's just gonna show it to you an hour later and i think that's just a pretty useful feature for students and everyone in general another thing that i really like about redwood flashcards is that it shows you the context of the flashcard and it's not just the question so for example right here we can see that the question is about clozapine and its side effects and i can see that clozapine is in the atypical antipsychotics class of drugs in the antipsychotics lecture and i think that's pretty useful especially when you're going to those flashcards which are pretty obscure and which are pretty pretty random having the skeletal structure right there in front of you helps you figure out what exactly the question is asking for another great reason that i like remnants flash cards is because i can easily practice these flash cards on the go on my phone by just logging into rem.io so that was pretty much it for how i take notes in revnote for medical school if you enjoyed this video you might like my other remnant content which i can link up right here it's a whole playlist and if you like more content like this make sure you subscribe to the channel because i'm planning on making my videos a little bit more regular now if you're planning on using ram node make sure you like the video and also leave a comment because i would love to know how many people i have actually convinced to move to rem note so i will see you in the next one then goodbye you

Channel: Jerzen Benny

Views: 31,535

Keywords: medical school, medicine, studying, active recall, spaced repetition, remnote

Id: 6bnBDcUh7GA

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021