A Productive Approach to Digitizing Study Notes for Students

Students typically write their notes by hand in lectures. This helps them to focus and to understand the subject better. Studies of handwritten versus typed note-taking show that students who handwrite their notes are more likely to get better grades. Around 9.5% of handwritten note-takers expected to get an A grade compared to only 6% of those who typed. So writing by hand during a lecture is beneficial.

But the problem starts after the lecture. Those notes stay in a notebook. They get difficult to search and are easy to lose. Students who want the best of both worlds need a way to properly digitize their handwritten notes. In this blog, we will look at a productive approach that students can use to digitize their study notes.

How Students Can Digitize Their Study Notes

It can be done through an OCR tool. We will discuss all the steps in detail below. 

1) Capture Images of Notes

Open the camera of your mobile and capture clean images of all your handwritten notes. Make sure that all the images are fully lit and the text is visible. If the camera on your phone is not good enough, you can scan your notes through a scanner. But clean and high quality images are necessary to get good results from any OCR tool.

2) Convert Images to Text

The next step is extracting the text from the images of your handwritten notes. And for this task, you need a reliable image to text converter tool that provides accurate results. There are plenty of such tools available on the internet. But only a few can provide good text extraction. That’s why you have to choose a tool carefully before actually using it.

Here are some of the key indicators you should observe in a good tool:

1. It should provide accurate results that you can check by running a sample image and evaluating the extracted text.

2. It should load and work fast enough.

3. It should offer batch processing so that you can upload multiple images at once to save time and effort.

4. It should be free to use for a normal user.

5. Providing formatted text output is a plus.

Here, we will use an image to text converter by jpgtotext.com which we found reliable (during our testing) for the following demonstration. The working of all such tools is almost similar. So you can use any tool you like. 

Open the tool and upload the image by clicking on the “Choose File” button. Or, you can drag and drop the images directly to the specified box.

(Link to the tool used: https://www.jpgtotext.com)

You can select the extraction mode also. “Simple OCR” means the tool will just extract the text and might not pay attention to keep things properly formatted. “Formatted OCR” means the tool will keep the text formatting intact. For example, if your notes contain a table, the tool will also provide you with the data in tabular form.

After uploading, hit the “Extract Now” button. 

The tool will start working, and after a while, you will get your text extracted in a box, as shown below.

After that, you can review, copy, or download your text in a .txt file by clicking on the download button. 

3) Save Notes in One Accessible Place

Some students save their notes on their devices, such as laptops. But later, they lose them or forget where they saved them when the notes are actually needed. To avoid such mishaps, save all your notes in one accessible place. If you want to save offline, MS Word is a good place to use. But an easier way is to save them online. There are plenty of online note-taking platforms like Google Docs and Online Notepad. You can choose what fits your requirements. 

Whenever you extract text from your handwritten notes, save them in your digital space and review them carefully. See if anything is missing or if any page is left. It will help ensure that all the notes are digitized accurately. 

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

• Make sure the images are clean before uploading. A blurry, dark, or tilted image will give you inaccurate results.

• Proofread the extracted text before saving. OCR tools are accurate but not perfect.

• Digitize your notes regularly. Do not let them pile up.

• Organize notes by subject and date. When you save your digital notes, create separate folders or sections for each subject and add the date to each file.

• Once your notes are in digital form, go through them and add any important points that were in your head during the lecture but did not make it to paper. 

• Pick one platform and save all your notes there. It makes your notes easy to find whenever you need them.

Final Words

Digital notes make studying easier. You can share them with your classmates in seconds without printing anything. You can copy them into an AI tool and ask it to summarize the key points, generate practice questions, or explain a concept you did not fully understand. This is something that is much more difficult to do with traditional paper notes alone. So digitizing your notes is not just about keeping them safe. It opens up a lot of ways to study better and faster.