<p>i'm with mavin. my laptop in high school was a godsend and i know i'll be using it for just about all of my notes in college. everything's just so much more organized and easier to study from that way.</p>
<p>and as for using the laptop outside, i do it all the time without <em>too</em> much difficulty; you're not going to be wanting to sit in the sun while you're using it anyway, so as long as you find somewhere shady to park it, you should be fine.</p>
<p>taking notes on a laptop sucks...</p>
<p>I mean, I can type great and I HATE writing things but you just dont learn it anywhere near as well when you type it because there is very little thought process in typing compared to hand copying.</p>
<p>I agree with Ottothecow. Think about it: typing notes while in class is like being a court reporter. If you can type verbatim what a professor says, you'll have a mirror image of what was said in class. Most people and students are not court reporters. While court reporters hear the same kinds of testimony over and over again, students are learning new facts and ideas each day. How well you absorb new material while typing will have a big impact on the quality of your notes. The more structured your professor is, the better you're notes will be... Not so structured? Not so good!</p>
<p>Handwritting your notes may be better since it works to slow you down. Counterintuitive as it sounds, you have to "process" what your hearing and summarize it into something that will be meaningful to you later. Not that you can't do this while typing, but it takes more disipline and skill to listen first and summarize rather than hear a neat phrase or idea and try to type it down word for word as the professor is moving on to his/her next point.</p>
<p>Think about your math and science classes: can't type formulas and equations.</p>
<p>Final point: get a Tablet PC. Write on the screen and capture your hand written notes digitally.</p>
<p>I agree with someone who said that it's a great studying method to handwrite notes then type them up. I always did that in high school. I never really looked at the typed notes but the act of typing them out really reinforces things for me.</p>
<p>to each his own. the only class i didn't use my laptop in was my calc class because it was almost entirely problem-based. but biology? english? history? if you tried to copy down /exactly/ what the teacher said in any of those via laptop or hand notes, there's no way you could have kept up. like michuncle said, taking in what a professor says and summarizing the important parts is a skill that you have to learn regardless of your notetaking methods. i think it boils down to personal preference more than anything, as either way you'll have to learn that skill.</p>
<p>and as for science classes... i think there's a program for everything. there was some app that i used to use on my last laptop for my chem class that was good for typing formulas/equations into my notes.</p>
<p>basically, you'll find a way to make it work if you really want to ;) personally, i used a laptop all 4 years of high school and just feel a lot more comfortable organizing my notes digitally than writing them by hand.</p>