Last updated April 10, 2022

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!V Taking notes for students in Obsidian

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Changes

2021-11-30

• Obsidian: NEW BEST Note-taking App Student Overview -

2021-11-22 changed thumbnail to before and after

Examples

Obsidian: NEW BEST Note-taking App Student Overview - BETTER than Roam Research

How to achieve more while studying less - Obsidian & Conceptual Notes

Keywords

note taking app student study tips

Titles

Title How to achieve more while studying less digital note taking note taking in university NEW BEST Note-taking App Student How to learn MORE while studying LESS - The BEST Digital Note Taking App for School, Students, University (Obsidian MD Guide)

Getting started with obsidian

New 2022 Note Taking Method With Obsidian MD

Learn MORE while studying LESS - BEST digital note taking app for students and school (obsidian md)

• How to learn MORE by studying LESS - the NEW BEST digital note taking app for students (Obsidian MD) 2021-11-16

How to take EFFECTIVE notes and study LESS using Obsidian conceptual notes (student note taking app)

The last note taking app you’ll ever need - Obsidian MD and conceptual notes for students

Innovate your note taking in school with Obsidian and conceptual notes - Digital Notes App

Innovate your notes using the new BEST digital app for students and school: Obsidian MD Overview

How to take EFFECTIVE notes and study LESS using Obsidian conceptual notes (digital note taking)

A new era of note taking - how to take conceptual notes with Obsidian MD for students and university

Obsidian MD - A MUST HAVE for student digital note taking and studying

Reach PEAK student productivity with organization, note taking, and studying app Obsidian MD

Obsidian: Ultimate Studying and Note Taking App for Spaced Repetition and Active Recall

Tried

Learn MORE while studying LESS - BEST digital note taking app for students and school (obsidian md)

• Virtually no traction outside of subscriber views

Notes

Details

Prompts

Start with why

What

Details:

Who

Reason for success:

What is my audience and how can I cater towards them?

• People who are looking for a new note taking system

Why

Personal/Channel Benefits:

• Can help gain people from the general studying niche
• Can lead to loyal followers as I introduced them into obsidian

Main ideas/messages:

• How obsidian can be useful for studying
• Why it’s better than other apps
• Reasons why you maybe shouldn’t use it

How

Extra preparation/research needed:

Type of video

• Mix of informational and demonstrational
• Make with the intent of converting others to obsidian

Contents of script:

Contents of visuals:

Helpful resources and materials:

Brainstorming

• + Obsidian NEW BEST Note-taking App Student Overview video style?

Thoughts

Brief outline of topics covered:

Shana’s suggestions

1. first and foremost, a simple overview of all of the useful widgets and functions that would be accessible to me
   • Talk about the basics of obsidian, start from a blank vault and showcase
2. maybe a delve into what you use? what personally works for you
   • Pull examples from my vault
3. what are the things i can use obsidian for outside of my studies
   • A lot xd
4. are there any limitations to what i can do (max amount of notes i can take, can i highlight/change the colour of text, customize my pages)
   • Max based on your amount of storage,
5. what are the positives/negatives if you can find any to talk about

Extra Practices

• Pomodoro timer
  • notifications in obsidian
• Kanban board

Outline

Intro

Hook:

How will you make sure the viewer is seen/understood within the first 15 seconds? What questions are you going to promise to answer?

• If you want a new tool to improve the way you take notes and study in school, then you’ve clicked on the right video.
• If you feel overwhelmed with all the ideas you’re taught in class, and struggle to understand things in your own way, this one app can improve the way you learn. You’ll be able learn and remember more with less effort.

In this video:

• I’ll share the various features and practices I use to help stay organized, take notes, and study with Obsidian MD, an app that’s helped me cultivate this web of ideas and notes throughout the past few months.
• I won’t just tell you why it’s good, I’ll show you how with examples from my own notes as I’m currently in my first semester of university.
  • You’ll learn how to do things like freely organize your school notes and courses, create an interconnected web of all your different ideas and concepts, and then finally turn your notes directly into flashcards for effective retrieval studying. You know what? go pause the video right and install the program on your laptop or computer so you can follow along and experiment with me to see the true power this app provides.

If you’re ready to revolutionize the way you learn forever, be sure to watch until the very end

Content

Obsidian Overview/Reasons to choose obsidian

So, why am I so obsessed with Obsidian? I’ll get into the brand new form of note taking it offers, but it’s important to understand the basics first.

First off, Obsidian is completely free to use, so all new features, themes, and plugins are available for download.

After downloading and opening the app like I recommended earlier, it’s time to create your first vault, which is a fancy term for the folder in which your notes and files are stored.

• Step by step instructions, created
  • The name isn’t too important
  • It’s confusing at first glance, but just bear with me

Obsidian stores all your notes, images, and files locally on your computer, but I personally store my files on the cloud to allow for syncing across my various devices. If you want to do the same, you can opt in for Obsidian sync which is $8 a month, or you can sync your vaults using iCloud or google drive. I personally have been using the free 5gb onedrive uses and it’s been more than enough.

• Anyways, Let’s create 3 new notes, which can be done in 3 different ways Note 1, 2, 3
  • Button on file explorer pane
  • Hotkey ctrl+n
  • Open quick switcher ctrl+o, type title of note then press shift and enter
    • I prefer this method as it allows me to name the note before creating it

To store what’s in your notes, Obsidian uses markdown format, which is differerent from what you might be used to with programs like microsoft word or notion.

To format your text you’ll have to follow certain syntax like prefixing lines with hashtags to create headers, as well as adding asterisks or underlines around text you want to bold or italicize. Looking at plain walls of text can be boring, so here’s how you spice your notes up a bit:

• Examples
  • Headers
  • Bold, italic, strikethrough, highlight
  • Specials
    • Quotes
    • Code blocks
    • Lines

You might be thinking, all these random symbols make my notes look horrible! Thankfully, using Obsidian’s preview mode enables the cleaner view you’re used to.

• To do this, you can either click the button up top or ctrl+e

It takes some time to learn markdown if you aren’t already familiar with it, so a handy reference guide would be the obsidian help vault. You can access by pressing f1 while obsidian is open, then open up the Format your notes note.

%%If you’re concerned about storage size, your vault shouldn’t take up a lot of storage as long as you don’t import too many pictures. I personally have over 2500 notes and 750,000 words which take up less than 100 megabytes. However, when also including all my images and plugins I have installed, it totals to around 250mb %% Next, something that’s super important and special about obsidian is the ability to connect your notes through internal links.

• Link note 1 to note 2, note 2 to note 3, note 3 to note 1

You know how you can jump around from page to page by clicking on highlighted words in wikipedia? Through these links, you can connect your notes the same way. Furthermore, these connections can be visually represented through the graph view where you can see the web of your notes. I’ll go more in-depth on how I use this later on in my note taking workflow.

There’s way more features and specifics I have yet to mention, so if you’re curious to learn more about obsidian itself first I would recommend you watch my video where I document my first week using Obsidian. Additionally, feel free to read up on more features out at their obsidian help website, which also serves as an example to the kinds of notes you can make in obsidian. Anyways, now that we have a basic understanding of the app, let’s dive right into some things you can do with obsidian to help in your student life.

Student-Specific

Course Notes Organization

Example Before we start taking notes, we should setup a structure to keep everything organized.

To organize everything related to my school life, I actually have a main note that keeps track of all information university-related.

Thanks to Obsidian, I can break all this information down into small notes for each unique idea, connecting everything using internal links.

I keep track of various things in here, whether it be personal stuff like the courses I’m currently taking, or informational stuff like opportunities and places to study at campus

• If I keep diving deeper, I also have a note for each course I’m currently taking, which acts as a launching pad for all the notes and information related to that course
  • From there it’s up to you on how to organize these course notes to best fit your own needs. Now, it’s your turn to make your own.

Application

• To save some time, I’ve created a main school note with some links to notes related to university
  • With obsidian, you don’t establish note hierarchy using folders. They can still be used, but your main method of organization are through these internal note connections
  • Let’s add on to this note by connecting a courses note to it to keep track of courses we’re taking this semester
    • I’m actually going to speed up the process by implementing a course template I use in my own vault
      • To use your own templates, create templates folder, add note into folder, enable templates, press ctrl + shift + t
      • Create math course

While we’re on the topic, templates are super important in automating my workflow and enhancing my productivity

• My templates range from outlines for writing assignments like essays, to templates with different prompts to help cultivate new ideas
  • My good friend Timothy Kenny, a featured instructor of multiple best-selling productivity courses on both udemy and skillshare, was generous enough to provide me with a template you guys can use to start generating and storing ideas in Obsidian. It’s called the “Ideas Bank Template”, which i’ve added a link to in the description so you can download and use right away. Timothy is doing me a huge favor by making one of his most popular templates available to you guys for free so I would highly recommend checking it out in the description and using it.
• If you want to use the school note and course template I used in this video, feel free to also check out my github repository, link in the description.

Now that you know a bit of the basics of Obsidian, it’s time to start taking notes for your courses. Next, I’ll go into the idea of conceptual note taking, and how I apply it into both abstract and technical courses

Note connections useful for abstract courses

First off, when I say abstract courses, I’m referring to subjects like psychology and biology where there’s a lot of connected and related concepts

With a normal folder hierarchy, it would be impossible to have a note in two folders at the same time

• ex) Create note about brain, bio and psychology folder,
  • related to both but can’t have it in both folders

However, with obsidian you can connect a note to multiple places at once by using internal links

• Add internal links
• Can see what notes are linked by checking backlinks pane
• If you want to actually embed the note instead of just linking it, add an ! to the internal link

Since breaking down your notes in Obsidian is recommended to help make more connections, you can have a large, main note representing a concept, which is then linked to smaller notes which represent specific points or examples

• Main note brain
• types of brain parts (hippocampus)
• short term memory loss
  • Dementia
    • stems from damage in the hippocampus

Instead of writing your notes in the same structure as the way they are presented, you’ll have more creative freedom in the way you organize your notes.

With this note taking strategy, you’ll create notes based on the different concepts you’re learning instead of the layout of your professors lecture. As you progress throughout the course and your degree or schooling, you can always build upon your previous ideas, elaborating on the concepts or making more connections.

Also, there’s no right or wrong way to write conceptual notes, so you can create notes that best support the way you think. To provide an example, here’s my notes on the book mindset, by Carol Dweck

• Example of linear vs example of obsidian (mindset)

For english courses where you may have to connect ideas from different readings to create an essay, the connections you’ve made in your notes can help synthesize ideas for the brainstorming process. By viewing all the ideas you have from a higher-order perspective like the graph view, you can begin finding connections and cultivating topics for discussion.

For more technical courses like programming and math, I can still use links to keep things organized, breaking each idea down into it’s smaller parts

• Discrete math moc
  • Can connect things that work in tandem with each other

Whenever I need to revisit a certain idea, I can easily review my notes by searching it up in the quick switcher.

Now that we have a rough idea on the the note-taking potential of obsidian, it’s time to see how we can enhance these notes to make studying easier and more effective.

Active recall, spaced repetition

If you’ve done your fair share of research on studying tips and practices, you’ve probably heard of active recall which is the process of quizzing yourself, and spaced repetition which is when you space out your studying instead of cramming it all at once.

Fortunately, we can use Obsidian plugins to incorporate these two study tips into Obsidian. First off, obsidian has a fold feature that allows you to quiz yourself in your notes

• enable this feature, head to settings, then editor, then enable both fold headers and outlines
  • You’d have to setup your notes with the main idea or cue as the header or first point, and the information or answer as content under the header or as a sublist

Doing this will already make your notes effective for studying by having to actively read and retrieve ideas, but with the spaced repetition plugin you can turn the contents of your notes into flashcards.

• Download spaced repetition plugin, make sure it’s enabled

  • Take existing note, add #flashcards
    • Show syntax ;; and ?, mention reverse cards
      • After reviewing a card, you choose when to re-see it based on how well you answered it
      • If you want to study on the go, you can download the obsidian app on your mobile device and use the plugin from there too
      • After doing a few cards, you can also see statistics to see how well you’ve done and what you could improve on

• If you want to review whole notes instead of just cards, you can tag the note with #review

  • Command pallete, open note for review
    • Can review, mark it as easy, medium, or hard, and it’ll automatically move it to a new date

I find this especially useful for technical courses as I can store the problems and questions related to each concept for me to practice on in Obsidian. Also, I’d like to note that the #flashcards tag is hierarchical, meaning you can add sub-tags to differentiate cards between classes.

• I have flashcards for computer science and math, and the plugin allows me to mix the two so I can partake in interleaved practice
  • If I only want to study one subject though, I change the tag in settings to the one for a specific class, and even a specific topic if I wanted to.

That’s enough on note taking, here’s some more neat features about obsidian that’s helped my student career

Daily notes

• I’ve been using the daily notes feature on Obsidian as a digital bullet journal to plan and journal my day to day life. It’s such an important part of my daily routine, and its fully customizable to your own needs.
  • Have some prompts to prime myself for the day
  • Keep track of daily tasks
  • Journal day
    • Keep track of what you did during class that day, record how you feel
  • add affirmations/inspirational quotes/reminders
  • add prompts for the end of the day to reflect and plan for tomorrow
• To easily see what you did on a certain day, you can download the calendar plugin to have access to all your daily notes
• If you want specifics, more can be learned in my daily notes video

The video’s getting a bit long, so I’ll just speed through the other potential plugins you can find useful

Extra Plugins

• You can use the daily notes plugin to create a digital bullet journal, which can be used to plan and prepare for a productive day of studying and effective time management.

• PDF annotator plugin allows you to highlight and make annotations in pdf files you import into Obsidian.

• Status bar pomodoro timer plugin adds a customizable timer to obsidian, with an option to log the number of pomodoros you do in a certain note

• Excalidraw plugin enables you to handwrite and draw diagrams, which can then be embedded into your notes

• You can add some flair to your vault notes and appearance by easily integrating emojis using the emoji toolbar plugin, or by adding a picture to the top of your notes using the banner plugin

• If you have trouble staying focused while writing or reviewing notes, you can download the focus mode plugin to hide the additional sidebar distractions, and pair it with the ghost fade focus plugin to fade text not at the center of the screen

• PDF annotator

  • If your class includes a lot of PDF readings, you can import them into the vault to annotate and highlight
  • Download annotator plugin
  • Drag pdf into vault
  • Open new note, copy syntax, put link in vault or url
  • Switch to annotate mode, can work side by side
  • Viewing notes
    • Split screen
    • Sliding panes plugin

• Pomodoro timer

  • Non-distracting and integrated pomodoro timer so you use less apps
  • Customize length and other settings
  • See progress on status bar so it’s not too distracting
  • Can log your pomos in a note

• Focus mode for writing, line-only mode for extreme focus

• Implementing hand-written digital notes

  • Download excalidraw
  • Create, draw
  • Embed file, save image

• Emoji toolbar and banners to add style to your notes hehe

  • download banner plugin
    • Import picture
    • Set as banner
  • Download emoji toolbar
    • setup hotkey, mine is ctrl+shift+e
    • Go ham

Those are just some of my personal recommended plugins, so feel free to check out the hundreds of other plugins available in the community plugins tab.

Conclusion

How can I sum up the contents of the video?

• Hopefully, my personal experiences with the program paired with your own experimentations can help you see the invaluable potential obsidian can provide in not just your schooling life, but the way you learn as a whole.

What are some relevant references or links?

• If you’re unsure on how to start off using Obsidian, you can watch my 7 day obsidian video to see how I started from a blank vault to the web I have now. If you want some personal guidance, I’m offering one on one consulting sessions where I can help you set up your Obsidian vault, clarify things you don’t understand, or learn more tips that I didn’t include in this video. Just head over to my kofi link in the description for more information. The style of this video is a bit different from my usual ones, so I would appreciate any feedback related to the improvised example parts. If you have any further questions or video ideas in mind, I’d be happy to hear them in the comments. Anyways, if you found my advice to be helpful please consider liking and sharing the video to other people who may need it, and subscribe for more content like this. This has been john mavrick, stay mindful.

References:

Created:: 2021-10-09 22:09